“Crescent Cuts: barber shop to the jihadists! We strike necks!”
“Murder suspect on personal jihad may have been groomed in Seattle barber shop,” by Pamela Browne, FoxNews.com, November 4, 2014:
A man accused of killing four people in two states is believed to have ties to a disrupted terrorist cell, a terrorist training camp on U.S. soil, and federal investigations going back more than a decade, a Fox News investigation has revealed.
Details of Ali Muhammad Brown’s life in crime and connections to radical Islam prior to the killings of a college student in New Jersey and three other men in Washington state since April 2014 is under renewed scrutiny. After his arrest in July, Brown, 29, told detectives from both states that he “was engaged in jihad” and referred to the specific murder of one victim, Brendan Tevlin, as a “just kill.”
Tevlin, 19, was murdered in West Orange, N.J., on June 25 while sitting in his car at a traffic light. He was shot eight times. Besides Brown, two other men have been arrested in Tevlin’s murder — Jeremy Villagran and Eric Williams.
Seattle authorities say ballistics link the same 9-mm. handgun that Brown used to kill Tevlin in New Jersey to three other homicide investigations in Washington state. On June 1, 23-year-old Dwone Anderson-Young and 27-year-old Ahmed Said were killed “execution style” as they sat inside a car in Seattle, Wash.
The same weapon was used to gun down 30-year-old Leroy Henderson on April 27 as he walked the streets of Skyway, Wash., authorities say.
Two former FBI agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF, revealed for the first time on a Fox News special, “Greta Investigates: The Lone Wolves of Terror,” that they believe Ali Muhammad Brown may have traveled to one of the first terrorist training camps on U.S. soil when he was a teenager.
Former FBI agents David Rubincam and David Gomez were interviewed by Fox News in Seattle. David Gomez told Fox, “I believe Ali Muhammad Brown at some point traveled to Bly, Ore., prior to his arrest for financial institution fraud.”
The JTTF executed 19 search and arrest warrants in November 2004 after a 30-month investigation, which became known as the “Ranier Valley Roundup.” No one, including Brown, was charged with terrorism.
Gomez recalled the case: “The objective is to make money, so they were involved in trying to raise money for themselves, but they were also raising money for a jihadist movement in Seattle. There is a quote in the indictment that says, ‘you can’t go to war broke’. ”
The JTTF investigation centered around “Crescent Cuts,” a small barber shop frequented by Brown. The shop was owned by Ruben Shumpert, a convicted drug dealer familiar to Gomez and other members of law enforcement.
“Ruben Shumpert was a prison convert to Islam,” noted Gomez. “He learned to cut hair in prison. Ruben would not only cut hair, but was attempting to indoctrinate a lot of the youth into radical forms of Islam by showing them videos about the 9/11 hijackers and Al Qaeda.”
Gomez added, “in 2004 with Ali Muhammad Brown, what we were looking at was the raising of funds for overseas material support of terrorism. He [Brown] was convicted of fraudulently producing checks, depositing them into accounts and spending the money basically.”
Brown was sentenced to two years in prison, but only served 84 days. He would lead a life of depraved crime and violence. Washington state court records from 2012 obtained by Fox News show Brown was charged with child rape before pleading guilty to three lesser counts of “communication with a minor for immoral purposes.“
Ruben Shumpert went on to fight alongside terrorists….