An American story

In middle school, he played on a traveling basketball team, one of those who goes from burb to burb, later on even played a little high school football. His mother often sat in the stands. You couldn't miss her--she was the only one in the hijab.

The kid was no star, but he had a great laugh and the rest of the guys thought he was a scream, a fun guy to be around. Truth be told, he and his family--his father was a Palestinian, his mother a converted Irish-American--lived in a quiet, gated Florida community. They were not poor. That's no answer here. They weren't poor at all. Some reports maintain the family owned several grocery stores.

The mosque where he worshiped was so small they had no imam, just a dozen believers getting down on their knees together, operating as if they were some old country church with an elder reading the sermon. In fact, because they had no regular leader, this kid sometimes became one because he seemed to know his way around the Koran as well as, if not better than the handful of others who came together to pray.

He liked cats, and he was a big fan of the Miami Heat, which means, almost certainly, that he, like millions of others, loved to watch LaBron James toss crushed chalk into the air in James's own never-miss pre-game ritual. Who knows?--a navy blue Heat jersey, number 23, may still be hanging in his closet.

Back in June, he made a video of himself eating chunks of his American passport, then burning the rest. “I lived in America; I know how it is,” he said. "Just sitting down five minutes drinking a cup of tea with mujahedeen is better than anything I've ever experienced in my whole life," he said. "You have all the fancy amusement parks, and the restaurants, and the food, and all this crap and cars. You think you're happy? You're not happy. I was never happy. I was always sad and depressed. Life sucked. ... All you do is work 40, 50, 60 hours a week."

So much for the American Dream.

And then, "You think you're safe where you are, in America or Britain,” he adds. “You think you are safe. You are not safe."

All of this from the cut-up, a kid with a sparkling sense of humor often seen dribbling down the street in Vera Beach, the kid who turned a rock-hard pillar of faith. "I want to rest in the afterlife," he said in an earlier video. "There is nothing here--my heart is not resting here in this life." He told others that his transition into the violence of the Middle East was relatively easy, not difficult at all because "Allah made it easy for me," words of a true believer.

"Glorious is God, and thank God--this is a grace from him," he says in a tape released later. "When I came to Syria, I had nothing. I had no money to buy a gun and ammunition, now God granted me all of that and much more." 

Just a few moments before he and four other suicide bombers ran their explosive-packed truck into a target in Syria and killed an as-yet undetermined number of Syrian soldiers, he radioed his accomplices, "I can see paradise and I can smell paradise."  

Those in the know, fear that while Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha was the first American suicide bomber in the war in Syria, other Americans have been recruited, which is to say, there may be more.

And this:  "I have one word to say ... we are coming for you. Mark my words. You think you killed Osama bin Laden? You sent him to paradise. Just know that we are coming."

He was 22 years old.