The complex romantic relationships of New Orleans terrorist Shamsud Din Jabbar with three former wives and multiple other partners

The individual responsible for the chaos in New Orleans on New Year’s Day had experienced three failed marriages and other relationships before affiliating with ISIS and carrying out an atrocious act that resulted in the deaths of 15 individuals.

Shamsud Din Jabbar, 42, rammed the vehicle, flying an ISIS flag, into a crowd of New Year’s Eve revelers in New Orleans about 3.15am on Wednesday.

Donned in military attire and equipped with explosives concealed within a white Ford F-150 Lightning, he callously drove into innocent bystanders before proceeding to open fire on more victims.

In the years leading up to the shocking event, Jabbar appeared to be an ordinary American citizen – having served 13 years in the US Army, establishing a real estate business, and holding a position at Deloitte.

The future terrorist appeared dashing and successful in uniform while making $120,000 a year as an IT consultant. He ultimately convinced three glamorous women to marry him.

But the romance was not long-lived. None of his wives stuck around as all three unions spectacularly collapsed with at least one of them claiming she was abused.

Jabbar’s most recent wife claimed in divorce papers that he destroyed the family finances with lavish ‘gifts to paramours’.

Jabbar’s first love was Nakedra ‘Nikki’ Charrlle Ball, now 41, whom he started dating before he enlisted, and was until recently still in contact with.

They married on June 25, 2008, and had two daughters, now aged 15 and 20, and he bought a newly built house in Cypress, on the outskirts of Houston, in June 2010.

But it didn’t take long after the wedding for the relationship to unravel while he was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

By 2012 they were divorced and Jabbar was ordered to pay child support, which by 2022 was $2,200 a month, along with providing medical insurance, according to documents from another of his divorces.

The house, which cost $124,000 when he bought it, was finally sold to another couple in July 2014, with his ex-wife appearing get part of the proceeds.

Nakedra remarried to Dwayne Marsh and lives in Houston, working as a quality engineer for cloud computing firm Alight Solutions – ironically the same field as her ex-husband.

Before Jabbar was even divorced from his first wife, he was already dating Tiera Symone Whitfield, now 34, across the country in Georgia.

The pair likely met when he was at the NCO Academy at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, just outside the city where Tiera grew up and still lives.

The couple married on September 15, 2013, in Augusta, with at least some of Jabbar’s family making the trip from Texas.

‘We will be going to Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s wedding in Georgia. Contact me if you want to share in the ride. Leaving Sept 13th and returning the night of the 15th,’ his mother Herma wrote on Facebook three weeks earlier.

During their marriage, Jabbar left active duty at the rank of staff sergeant in January 2015 and joined the army reserve as an information technology operations manager.

They moved to the Atlanta suburbs and he began his bachelor’s degree in business administration for computer information systems at Georgia State University.

Tiera was the only one of Jabbar’s three wives who didn’t bear him children. Instead, their attempt to start a family ended in tragedy when Tiera suffered a miscarriage at six months pregnant and lost their unborn son.

Just months after his studies began, Jabbar filed for divorce in February 2016, on the grounds that ‘our marriage is irretrievably broken’.

His handwritten form declared the couple ‘can no longer live together and there is no hope that we will get back together’.

Tiera was glad to be done with him, claiming to TMZ that their marriage was unhappy and Jabbar abused her, though she wouldn’t elaborate.

Four years later, Tiera was remarried and gave birth to a daughter during Covid lockdown in April 2020, which she detailed on Facebook.

Jabbar finished his degree in 2017 and moved back to Texas, founding Blue Meadow Properties, which he marketed as a veteran-owned business.

He decided third time was a charm and married Shaneen Chanti McDaniel, now 40, who grew up in his home town of Beaumont, Texas.

They were wed on November 15, 2017, in Fresno, Texas, where he had bought a four-bedroom family home for $177,000 that February.

A son, now 6, followed the next year but by the pandemic they were at each other’s throats in a bitter, and expensive, divorce.

Jabbar fired the first salvo on July 17, 2020, when he filed for divorce, calling the marriage ‘insupportable due to discord or conflict of personalities’.

Judge David Perwin felt it wise to order the couple to stay away from each other while it was ongoing.

The standard conditions prohibited them ‘threatening the other party or a child of either party with imminent bodily injury’.

Neither could also withdraw the child from school, hide them, or move them out of the jurisdiction.

They reconciled just a month later, telling the court they ‘both no longer desire to prosecute his/her respective suits against the other party’.

The couple’s détente only lasted about a year before Jabbar again filed for divorce, and this time Shaneen wasn’t playing nice.

Jabbar was ‘entrusted with the management, control, and disposition of substantially all community estate funds’, her lawyer wrote – but squandered them.

One document claimed he violated their ‘fiduciary relationship’ and ‘intentionally and in flagrant disregard of the duties as manager and trustee of the community funds mismanaged the community estate, all in fraud of’ her financial interest.

Jabbar claimed he was broke at the time, telling the court he had a net monthly income of about $7,500 but monthly expenses of about $8,960.

He was in a financial hole because his real estate company was bleeding money, losing $28,000 the previous year.

Shaneen blamed his financial situation on ‘excessive cash withdrawals, gifts to paramours’ and ‘unreasonable and unnecessary spending’ in her court filings. 

The court statement was the only public allegation of infidelity during any of his three marriages.

However, the end of his first and beginning of his second were close together and he started dating Tiera the year before his divorce from Nakendra was finalized.

Whichever way he got into financial trouble, he told the court he had $16,000 in credit card debt to pay his legal fees and living costs.

This was despite Deloitte paying him almost $125,000 a year as a data engineering and business development senior consultant.

‘Time is of the essence. I can not afford the house payment,’ he wrote in an email to Shaneen’s lawyer Daryl Longworth in January 2022.

‘It is past due in excess of $27,000 and in danger of foreclosure if we delay settling the divorce. 

‘The home was not in default at the time we agreed to the temporary orders. l misunderstood the terms of the loan modification I had applied for at the time.’

Jabbar suggested he and Shaneen sell the house and divide the profits evenly, but instead sold the house to her to cover his debts.

Shaneen was awarded full custody of their son, Jabbar only getting visitation rights, and he was ordered to pay $1,353 a month in child support.

Being taken to the cleaners in the divorce was partly the fault of Jabbar’s fed-up lawyer Robert Tsai dumping him in September 2021.

Tsai, who handled his divorce from Nakendra, told the court he couldn’t ‘effectively communicate’ with Jabbar ‘in a manner consistent with good attorney-client relations’.

Jabbar, too broke to pay for another attorney, was forced to represent himself.

Out of money and single, Jabbar moved into a mobile home on a squalid block surrounded by farm animals in Houston he found in a Facebook marketplace listing.

His landlord, Asia Maryam, told the New Orleans Advocate that he paid cash on time every month, worked from home, and never caused problems.

Jabbar, in five videos recorded just hours before his terrorist attack, said he joined ISIS before the summer of 2024, but his faith before that is debated.

His youngest brother Abdur Jabbar, 24, said they were raised Muslims and went to mosque every Friday, but his father Rahim’s social media posts frequently praise God and quote the Christian Bible.

His father suffered a stroke in 2023 and he was helping arrange for his care. 

Tiera said during the time they were together he wasn’t religious.

Jabbar was also caught driving while intoxicated twice – in North Carolina in November 2014 and Fresno, Texas, in November 2020 – despite Muslims not being allowed to drink alcohol at all.

Each time he was suspended from driving, fined, put on probation, and ordered to complete substance abuse classes.

But at some point in the past several years, friends said he became ‘enthralled in his faith’ and began to frequently post about Islam on his social media.

‘Pretty much every conversation we had or post that he was making at that time, in some way, shape or form, it all, you know, resorted back to his Muslim faith,’ his old classmate Chris Pousson told CNN.

But they insisted none of it was extremist or promoted violence, and couldn’t believe it when he was named as a ISIS-supporting terror suspect.

‘He really was smart, almost nerdish. Like, he was a really good dude back then,’ one friend recalled of when they knew him before he enlisted.

Abdur Jabbar told Reuters his brother recently renewed his Muslim faith after abandoning it in his 20s and 30s.

‘He was maybe looking for some types of answers,’ he said. 

By the time he joined Deloitte in 2021, he was devout enough to list prayer among his interests, alongside hunting, on his staff bio – along with a Quran passage about how Muslims will be rewarded by Allah after death.

‘Indeed, the righteous will drink from a cup whose mixture is of Kafur, A spring of which the servants of Allah will drink,’ it read.

‘They will make it gush forth in force. They fulfill vows and fear a Day whose evil will be widespread.’

By last year, Jabbar was behaving so erratically that Nakendra refused to let him see his daughters.

Dwayne Marsh, her new husband, told the New York Times that Jabbar was ‘being all crazy, cutting his hair’.

Nakendra posted photos of their daughters dressed up as The Joker and a knight, and her young son with Marsh as Spiderman, on Halloween two months ago.

Their eldest, Al-Eyah Jabbar, 20, is a university student, and refused to comment to DailyMail.com when contacted.

Tiera also told TMZ that Jabbar contacted her two months ago, for the first time in years, because he was thinking about the son they lost to miscarriage. 

She is now an author and hair care entrepreneur, remarried to the father of her daughter and still living in Augusta.

Tiera was so in the dark about Jabbar being radicalized that she posted an upbeat New Year message on Facebook at 8.45am – five-and-a-half hours after the attack.

‘As we step into this new year, may you find healing in your heart, strength & peace in your mind, restoration of your soul, and most importantly, courage to embrace all the blessings God has in store for you,’ she wrote.

‘Trust that His purpose for your life is unfolding perfectly, even when the path is uncertain. May you walk with grace, knowing that His love will guide you every step of the way. 

‘This year is your time for renewal, growth, and divine breakthroughs. Keep believing – God’s purpose for your life is greater than any challenge you face. Welcome 2025.’

Jabbar, in his videos recorded between 1.29am and 3.02am, referenced his divorces and said he planned to gather his family and friends for a ‘celebration’, then murder them all.

But he changed his mind because he wanted news headlines to focus on ‘war between the believers and the disbelievers’ rather than personal grievances.

‘He was smart, funny, charismatic, loving, compassionate, humble, and literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. That’s why it’s so devastating,’ Abdur said.

‘This degree of maliciousness is not like him. We are trying to understand what changed, too.’