Chris Pousson grew up with Shamsud-Din Jabbar -- the terrorist who killed 14 people in New Orleans in the early hours of New Year's Day -- and reconnected with him online in recent years ... but he says Jabbar never gave any indication of being a killer.
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00:00Talk about when you connected with him first about childhood and then we'll get into the more recent.
00:08Yeah, we first met in middle school. We were in the same 8th grade school together and then just coincidentally we both moved to the same town in 9th grade and wound up going to the same 9th grade campus and we just maintained our friendship all through high school.
00:27You called him Sham. What was he like as a kid?
00:30Very much as he was up until the last few times I had spoke to him. He was always reserved. He was always pretty much kept to himself and quiet. He wasn't a troublemaker, wasn't a class clown, nothing like that. He did his work. He was very smart and he just kind of did his own thing.
00:47When we graduated, he joined the Army, I joined the Air Force, so we kind of lost contact for several years there. When Facebook came online, we reconnected and then it was at that point I had noticed that he had really put a lot more of his life focus on his faith.
01:05Did you ever notice that the faith turned into something that was radical?
01:09Oh, no, never. Whenever we were kids and whenever we were in high school, we never spoke about religion or politics or anything like that, so whenever we did reconnect and he did become more vocal about his Muslim faith and his beliefs, it was kind of a surprise, but it really wasn't anything bad.
01:28He never spoke negatively about anybody. He didn't harvest any negative angst towards any particular group or towards America or anything like that. Every interaction we had was always positive.
01:41What was the first thing that went through your mind when you heard about this attack and then you found out it was your childhood friend?
01:47It was gut-wrenching. Absolutely devastating. A friend of mine, a mutual friend of ours actually, messaged me yesterday morning and asked me if I had seen the news, and whenever he sent me a link, I read the article. It was from some third-party news agency, and I told him it's probably just a mistaken identity.
02:09Don't believe it. And then just the more information that was uncovered and then the pictures surfaced online and then just everything else that reports have been putting out there, it's just unbelievable. I had no idea that he was capable of doing this. I did not see this coming at all.
02:29Or is there anything, not necessarily that he's capable of committing this kind of a terrorist act, but something that felt amiss?
02:36No, never. As a matter of fact, every time we spoke, even up until the time where we stopped communicating back and forth, he was always very positive. Everything he said was always in a positive light.
02:51He was always wishing people well. He would say stuff like, praise to Allah. He was Muslim, and he would say stuff like, God is the best. He was very vocal about his faith, but it was never a radical extremist-type conversation that would have been like, oh, maybe I should tell somebody about this.
03:17From the shame that I knew and from the shame that I remember, this is completely out of character. If something happened since 2020 and whatnot, I wouldn't know.