A man sprays bullets from a silver convertible Mustang at a military recruiting center tucked into a Chattanooga, Tennessee, strip mall. He moves to another military facility a few minutes later, a few miles away, killing four Marines there before he dies.
Authorities have identified the man behind the carnage as Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez. What they haven’t said is what spurred this once accomplished student, well-liked peer, mixed martial arts fighter and devout Muslim to do it.
Terrorism is one real possibility.
Hours after Thursday’s shooting, U.S. Attorney Bill Killian told reporters that authorities are treating it as an “act of domestic terrorism.”
Ed Reinhold, the FBI special agent in charge in eastern Tennessee, stressed that investigators “have not determined whether it was an act of terrorism or whether … it was a simple, criminal act.” He added that as of just before midnight Thursday, “we don’t have anything that directly ties him to an international terrorist organization.”
Finding out Abdulazeez’s motive is a top priority, as is learning who he interacted with and how they might factor into the bloodshed.
“We are checking every possible place that he … could have resided, visited, where he shopped, where he went to school, who his friends were, if he worked out at a gym,” said Reinhold. “Every possible lead.”
Two shooting scenes, four Marines killed
Gina Mule was opening up her restaurant late Thursday in a small plaza along Chattanooga’s Lee Highway when she heard a “pow, pow, pow!”
“He never got out of the car. He had a big, huge, high-powered rifle, and he was unloading shots right into the recruiters,” referring to the offices of an armed forces recruiting center. “There had to be 20 to 30 shots.”
Watching from a nearby hair salon, April Grimmett saw a man ducking between cars.
“Shortly after that, we heard the (shots). It was very loud and very fast,” she said. “It was insane.”
It only got worse.
Over the next half-hour, Abdulazeez, a 24-year-old with an engineering degree from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, drove his rental car to a Navy operational support center 7 miles away, a law enforcement official said.
He rammed the gates of the center and got into the facility, said Reinhold, who added that investigators are still trying to pin down whether or not he got inside a building.
He was armed with an AK-47-style weapon and 30-round magazines, according to two law enforcement officials. He kept police at bay for some time before being killed, with Reinhold saying Thursday night it “has not been determined … how he died.”
A Marine recruiter, who has since been treated at a hospital and released, was wounded in the first shooting, and four Marines were killed at the second scene.
The military hasn’t released their names.
But social media, including from Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, say one of the dead is Thomas Sullivan, a Springfield native who was a Marine gunnery sergeant. Friends also said Skip Wells, a 2012 graduate of Sprayberry High School outside Atlanta, was also killed.
Another sailor, a man, was in “pretty serious” condition after surgery, a Pentagon official said.
Also, a police officer was shot in the ankle. A law enforcement source close to the investigation identified him as Dennis Pedigo, one of the first responders on the scene.
No indications yet that Abdulazeez posed a threat
Authorities aren’t aware if, as he carried out the rampage, Abdulazeez said anything about his religion or did anything to suggest he belonged to a terrorist group, says a law enforcement official.
He was a devout Muslim but didn’t appear to be radical, according to some who knew him. The Kuwaiti-born Abdulazeez, who officials say had Jordanian citizenship and was a naturalized U.S. citizen, seemed to joke about his background in his high school yearbook, with a quote alongside his picture that read: “My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do?”
His former mixed martial arts coach Almir Dizdarevic said Abdulazeez’s father told him that his son had left the United States to “move back home.” And yet Dizdarevic said that Abdulazeez told him he was teaching wrestling and doing well.
“He was a good kid. … They’re good people,” neighbor Dean McDaniel said of Abdulazeez and his family.
His former high school wrestling coach Kevin Emily described Abdulazeez as “a great student” and “great kid” who sometimes missed practice to pray and “always contributed, always did what I asked him to do.”
For years, Samantha Barnette sat next to him in class, but now she says she feels like she never really knew him.
“He was also incredibly intelligent, which really makes me wonder about his true motives for doing this,” she said. “He was always getting recognized for his high grades and getting awards all throughout school. It’s upsetting to see him waste it all.”
Abdulazeez had a DUI arrest in April but didn’t raise any alarms in Chattanooga before the shooting.
“We certainly didn’t have any indication that he was a threat or that … something was going to happen,” Mayor Andy Berke told CNN’s “New Day” on Friday morning.
What was the security situation?
Still, authorities are painfully aware that such threats do exist. Terrorists around the world have unleashed venom, and sometimes attacks, on U.S. troops, citizens and the government. The United States has responded with force, going after groups such as ISIS and al Qaeda.
Much of that back-and-forth has happened overseas, including attacks on places like Iraq and Afghanistan. But the home front hasn’t been completely safe, in particular military installations.
The bloodiest cases were the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and then-Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s 2009 massacre at the Fort Hood, Texas, base that left 13 dead and 32 injured.
There have been other attacks on military recruiting centers. A bomb exploded in front a recruiting center in New York’s Time Square in 2008 and, the next year, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad killed one soldier and wounded another at a military recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2011.
While there’s been no indication Abdulazeez was part of a terrorist network, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said authorities are stepping up security at “certain federal facilities, out of an abundance of caution.”
“We take all shootings very seriously,” President Barack Obama said. “Obviously when you have an attack on a U.S. military facility, then we have to make sure that we have all the information necessary to make an assessment in terms of how this attack took place and what further precautions we can take in the future.”
Residents of Chattanooga are not only on guard, but they are shock.
Yet while Gov. Bill Haslam admits “this is a great city whose heart is broken right now,” he says residents are finding strength in one another.
“People are already coming together,” he said Friday. “(They are) doing … one of the things Tennesseans do best, which is (ask), ‘How can we help? What can we do to make a difference?’ “