Tenn. gunman used drugs, struggled with clash of faith

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/chattanooga-shooter-an-aimless-young-man-who-smoked-dope-and-shot-guns/2015/07/18/c213f6a6-2d7d-11e5-a5ea-cf74396e59ec_story.html

By Greg Jaffe, Cari Wade Gervin and Thomas Gibbons-Neff
July 18 at 9:37 PM

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — A few months before he killed five U.S. service members in a shooting rampage here, the 24-year-old gunman, who often joked that he was just an “Arabian redneck,” was smoking marijuana with friends.

It was getting late and Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez had work the next morning at his new job some two hours away in Franklin, said a close friend who was with him that night and spent several hours with him in the days leading up to the shooting.

Abdulazeez dropped off a couple of his friends at their homes on the night in April, snorted some crushed caffeine pills and started to drive.

A little after 2?a.m., Abdulazeez was arrested for driving under the influence, according to court papers, an incident sharply at odds with blog posts in which he portrayed himself as a devout Muslim and his existence in this world a “prison of monotony and routine.”

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