When it came to jihad, Elton Simpson talked a lot. He wasn't loud about it — he wasn’t trying to grab attention for himself. Instead he was calm, quiet, and persistent. For most of his life, his jihad was personal and internal — should he have sex outside of marriage? Drink alcohol? How could he get nonbelievers to see?
The graduate of Washington High School in Glendale, Arizona, talked so much that an FBI informant who posed as Simpson’s friend and a fellow Muslim recorded more than 1,000 hours of their conversations from 2007 to 2009. It was enough evidence to fill two bankers boxes with compact discs.
In 2010, federal prosecutors brought terrorism charges against Simpson, 25 years old at the time, arguing he lied to FBI agents about his alleged plans to travel to Somalia to join terror group al-Shabaab. It was federal public defender Kristina Sitton’s job to represent him.
Simpson and the informant “sat around and talked a lot about religion,” Sitton told BuzzFeed News. “I remember thinking, Gosh you guys have a lot of time on your hands. If you would just get a job…”
In her closing arguments that October, Sitton invoked the First Amendment. She spoke of the jihad that happens within a person as their morals are tested. She used, as an example, the fervent protesters fighting what was known as the Ground Zero mosque — a prayer center planned close to the World Trade Center that ultimately never came to fruition. Her arguments convinced the judge that Simpson wasn’t guilty of terrorism. (He was convicted of lying to the FBI and served three years of probation.)
Ironically, the face of those Ground Zero mosque protests was activist and conservative blogger Pamela Geller. Five years later, it was Geller who held a widely criticized event in Garland, Texas, asking people to draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which is considered blasphemous among most Muslims.
“If you come to this country, stand for freedom. Don’t try to impose your brutal and extreme ideology on freedom loving peoples,” Geller wrote about her contest for drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. “That's why we are holding this contest.”
It was that event, years after his federal prosecution, where Simpson’s talk graduated into action. He and his roommate Nadir Soofi — dressed in body armor and armed with AR-15 rifles — drove up to the event in Soofi’s Chevy Cobalt and opened fire. (Geller’s group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, paid $10,000 to hire extra security, and a police SWAT team was on standby.) An unarmed school district officer was struck in the ankle. Simpson and Soofi were fatally shot by a local traffic officer. “They were there,” Garland police spokesperson Joe Harn later said, “to shoot people.”
The forces that drive a person from rhetoric to violence are often murky and confusing. Some experts describe the personal backgrounds of radicalized Americans as otherwise “unremarkable” — this is certainly so in Simpson and Soofi’s case. The people closest to both men told BuzzFeed News and other outlets they were completely in the dark about their plans, and that even with 20/20 hindsight, the signs of impending violence were largely not apparent. Still, there are a few factors that radicals often share: a lack of economic mobility, being the target of racism, a search for identity, a sense of profound political injustice. Both men had experience with these factors — and seemingly found common ground in each other. To the outside world, everything seemed normal.
Simpson was born in the Chicago area, then moved to Phoenix by the time he was in middle school. He converted to Islam as a teen; he told others the faith helped him give up drinking and premarital sex.
He was a point guard for the Washington High School Rams and was praised in local reports as a driving force on the team. After graduating in 2002, he continued to play basketball at Yavapai College in Prescott, about two hours from Phoenix. The 5-foot-10, 180-pound freshman averaged 3.4 points in his 34 games, usually coming in late as a backup to the team’s All-American guard, the Prescott Daily-Courier reported. Simpson suffered an injury, though, and moved back to his parents’ home in the Phoenix area after his freshman year.
Over the next several years, he became a regular figure at area mosques and made friends, for the most part, with other young men who liked to talk about Islam and what was happening to Muslim people around the world.
Usama Shami
Ross D. Franklin / AP
Usama Shami, president of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, remembered Simpson as a normal, likable young man. Simpson had been a Muslim for years, but still had questions typical of an enthusiastic young convert. Simply put, “he wanted to know more about the faith,” Shami said.
Simpson also pitched in with volunteer projects like neighborhood cleanups and youth events. He’d play pickup games of basketball and soccer. “He was not different from any young person who was at the mosque,” Shami said.
One of his friends around that time was Hassan Abu-Jihaad, a former Navy signalman who also converted to Islam. The FBI began investigating Abu-Jihaad in 2003, after a floppy disc with classified information about the security weaknesses and movements of the USS Benson and other ships was found in the possession of a British fundraiser for al-Qaeda. Agents traced the document to Abu-Jihaad, then continued to investigate him and those around him after his honorable discharge and return to Arizona. He was arrested in 2007 and later found guilty of providing material support to terrorism and leaking national defense information.
In the fall of 2006, the FBI asked a young Sudanese man, Dabla Deng, who had come to the U.S. as a refugee to become friends with Simpson. Deng introduced himself at the Islamic Community Center, identifying himself as a recently converted Muslim — even though he’d been persecuted in Sudan for his Christian faith. Over the course of six years, the FBI would pay him $132,000 for the information he provided.
He wore a wire as he and Simpson went out for kabobs, watched videos on YouTube, and played basketball.
On March 8, 2007, FBI agents had their first face-to-face contact with Simpson. They stopped by as he and another friend were hanging out and questioned him about his relationship with Abu-Jihaad.
“Mr. Simpson said Hassan Abu-Jihaad is a good brother, and that’s all he had to say about the subject,” an FBI agent later testified. As the FBI finished questioning Simpson’s friend, he passed the time by chatting with an agent about the principles of Islam.
Deng kept wearing the wire. On July 31, 2007, the topic of fighting kaffir — nonbelievers — came up.
“The brothers in like, Palestine and stuff, they need help,” Simpson said, according to court records. He also mentioned Afghanistan and Iraq, “wherever the Muslims are at.”
“The whole thing is how you get there, though,” he continued.
In his role as a paid informant, Deng pushed him to go further: “I know we can do it, man. But you got to find the right people.”
“Gotta have connects,” Simpson agreed.
The recorded conversations, as well as surveillance by FBI agents, continued for two more years. On May 19, 2009, Osama bin Laden released a recording calling for all true Muslims to support the fight of al-Shabbab in Somalia.
Ten days later, Deng recorded another conversation with Simpson. In a snippet played at his trial, Simpson was heard singing. Prosecutors described the moment not as lighthearted, but as the conversion point, celebrating the beginning of a plan to pursue violent, international terrorism.
“It’s time to go to Somalia, brother,” Simpson said, adding they knew people there. Al-Shabaab is based in Somalia. “We gonna make it to the battlefield, akee, it’s time to roll.”
Later that year, Simpson made plans to leave the U.S. to study at a madrassa in South Africa. In one recorded conversation, he described musing with another friend about making his way to Somalia from South Africa. When he told Deng he was going to school, Deng replied, you never know who will be a fighter and who will be a scholar.
“Yeah, that’s the whole point,” Simpson said. “School is just a front. School is a front, and if I am given the opportunity to bounce…”
He was set to leave Jan. 15, 2010. On Jan. 7, 2010, agents knocked on the door of his parents' home. Simpson answered, stepped outside, closed the door, put on his shoes, and answered their questions. He said he was going to leave the following week to study in South Africa and that he was just waiting on his visa. He planned to stay for five years and wasn’t sure what he’d do after that.
They asked if he’d ever discussed going to Somalia.
Simpson said he didn’t know where they would have gotten that information.
One agent kept pushing; Simpson kept deflecting. He turned to the other agent.
“I thought we were having a friendly conversation here,” Simpson said.
The first agent continued: It’s a simple yes or no question. Had Simpson ever discussed going to Somalia?
“No,” Simpson said.
In the eyes of the FBI, that deception indicated Simpson was serious, an agent later testified.
“He had talked about obviously going to Somalia, and if given the opportunity, he would go,” Special Agent Jeffrey Hebert said. “It was our responsibility, given our investigative priorities, to try to disrupt that travel any way we could.”
The FBI scrambled to put him on a no-fly list, but they were unsuccessful.
“Nobody thought he was for real,” said Sitton, his former attorney. “Nobody did. I don’t even think [the FBI] really did.”
Simpson “wasn’t loud and in your face,” when he talked about Islam, Sitton added. “It was just kind of constant and just, ‘Come on, why don’t you believe this way. Come on, you’re a smart girl.’”
On Jan. 13, 2010, Simpson was indicted on suspicion of making a false statement in support of international terrorism. He was taken into custody and held in lieu of $100,000 bond.
With the help of friends, he made bail and was put on GPS monitoring as he awaited trial. Sitton began reviewing what she saw as “bogus charges.”
“I’ve never seen such a minor case be made so major in the federal system,” she said. “You just don’t see that.”
After years of investigation and thousands of dollars in payment to Deng, the FBI may have felt pressure to show results, she said. As the case progressed, Simpson also refused their offers of “cooperation” if he would provide information about other people, she said.
He’d already turned down an opportunity to join terrorists overseas, she argued. At one point, the FBI gave Deng $10,000 and told him to offer to pay Simpson and their other friends’ plane tickets. Deng claimed he had won the money from the lottery.
Simpson and the others debated whether the money was sinful, since it came from gambling. Simpson never took it.
The judge ultimately found Simpson guilty of making a false statement to federal agents, though there was no finding he did it to support terrorism. He was sentenced to three years probation.
“In some ways, I think [the FBI] might have struck too soon,” Sitton said. “I always thought their case was BS. They should have waited for more.”
The experience seemed to give Simpson the feeling of being an outsider, betrayed by those around him, said Deedra Abboud, a Phoenix attorney who has done advocacy work with local Muslim groups.
Simpson believed the informant was not just a friend, but a fellow Muslim. At the time, Abboud helped a few of his other friends navigate the system to get him out on bail.
When Simpson returned to daily life, though, he found that some in the Muslim community were suspicious of him — maybe he had become an informant too, they wondered.
“If he talked about anything negative, it was his frustration that the Muslims didn’t support him,” Abboud said.
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