WRCB News in Chattanooga reports that Muhammed Youssef Abdulazeez, the 24-year-old gunman who launched a murderous attack on a military recruiting office and training center, was arrested for DUI last April.
“Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez was stopped in a 2001 grey Camry in the 300 block of Martin Luther King Boulevard on April 20,” the station reports.
“He was pulled over after he reportedly failed to maintain the lane and was driving under the speed limit. He stopped at green lights, according to the [police] report,” WRCB continues. “Officers smelled marijuana when they approached him. He had droopy eyelids and a white powdery residue under his nose. He told police he had crushed caffeine pills and snorted them. He refused a blood test and officers obtained a warrant to draw blood.”
The officers found him showing signs of impairment during his sobriety test. While bloodwork discovered no alcohol in his system, a drug test is reportedly still pending, and he was due to appear back in court at the end of this month.
“Court records show that he was also cited for speeding and not having insurance in March 2011 by Tennessee Highway Patrol,” adds the WRCB report.
There may yet be other details about Abdulazeez’s legal history forthcoming from other jurisdictions, because he apparently moved around quite a bit, for someone so young. WKYC News reports he lived and worked for a while in northeastern Ohio, including a stint at the Perry Nuclear Power Plant in 2013, which evidently did not go well because he was only there for ten days.
The Lake County Sheriff’s Office reports that he was issued a traffic ticket of some sort during his time in Ohio, and he was evidently also evicted from an apartment for unspecified reasons.
It would seem Abdulazeez became a much more devout Muslim after his DUI arrest. Fox News cites various sources saying that he grew a beard, began attending Friday prayers at his local mosque, and in the days before the attack wrote a few blog posts about his understanding of Islam, including one that talked about a test to “separate the inhabitants of Paradise from the inhabitants of Hellfire.”