Inside Alleged Chattanooga Shooter's Home Life
What friends and court documents can tell about his family.
— -- Friends of the suspected Chattanooga gunman say that he came from an "all-American family" that shared a strong bond, despite divorce documents that hinted at a turbulent past.
The relatives of alleged Chattanooga gunman Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez have not spoken out in the wake of the fatal shooting on Thursday that left four Marines dead and three other individuals injured.
But some of those who knew him spoke out on his behalf.
“His family was always really close,” Kagan Wagner, a friend of Abdulazeez’s from middle school and high school, told ABC News.
Wagner said that she was close with Abdulazeez and had many mutual friends though they have not spoken since high school. When they were classmates, she went to his house “once or twice” and met his parents, whom she described as “really good people.”
“His family was always tight. They loved each other they cared about each other. They were involved in each others lives,” Wagner said.
“They were just an all-American family. They lived in a really nice house in the suburbs."
Though Wagner said that Abdulazeez was a diligent student in middle school, his high school history teacher Brad Benefield suggested that his grades may have slipped briefly.
“I believe I met his dad at a parent’s teacher conference or something like that. The parents were concerned about his grades,” Benefield told ABC News. “He wasn’t a really driven student – he was about average.”
Benefield said they “seemed liked a regular family… assimilated, still living Muslim faith. Assimilated – nothing out of the ordinary and his sister was in a club that I sponsored, but never in class. They lived a Muslim faith and made no bones about that.”
Abdulazeez graduated high school in 2008 and began studying at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. Court documents suggest that the following year marked some changes at home as well.
In 2009, Abdulazeez’s mother, Rasmia, filed divorce papers claiming her husband Yousuf beat her, “at times in the presence of the parties’ children."
“On occasion, Defendant [Yousuf] has also been physically and verbally abusive towards the children, striking and berating them without provocation or justification," the papers say. Yousuf also said he wanted to take a second wife, as he said was permitted under Islamic law, the court papers allege.
Abdulazeez’s parents appeared to reconcile and the divorce proceedings were dropped just three weeks after they began. They have not responded to requests for comment since the shooting.
Around the same time as the court filings, Abdulazeez took up mixed martial arts and his trainer Scott Schrader told ABC News that his parents did not appear to approve of his choice to get involved with the sport because his father did not like Abdulazeez hitting people in the face.
Abdulazeez had his first fight shortly after his 18th birthday and though he had told Schrader that his parents would be out of town at the time of the fight, they were there when the fight was over.
“As he was coming out of the ring, his father and his mother were both standing at the bottom of the cage and you could tell his dad was not happy with him,” Schrader said.
ABC News' Lee Ferran contributed to this report.
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