Family of Kori Ali Muhammad, accused of racially motivated killings, say his rage was linked to mental health issues that were never properly treated

Kori Ali Muhammad felt under attack. The man from Fresno often talked of liberating black people, facing discrimination as an African American man with a criminal record and the injustice of the “white man holding us down”.

“He was just so angry – angry at the system,” said Sharisse Kemp, a cousin who grew up alongside Muhammad. “But I didn’t get the feeling he was a danger to himself or anyone.”

Kemp, 33, was sent into a state of shock on Tuesday when she got a call from her mother saying that police had accused Muhammad, 39, of fatally shooting three white men at random in downtown Fresno, California. He allegedly shouted “God is great” in Arabic and said he wanted to kill as many white people as possible.

The deadly rampage has made headlines across the globe, with some conservatives in the US labeling Muhammad a Muslim terrorist, blaming the Black Lives Matter movement and claiming that the media was failing to give the shooting the attention it deserves as an anti-white hate crime.

Kori Ali Muhammad. Photograph: Courtesy of his family

But in Fresno, an agricultural community in the Central Valley three hours south of San Francisco, stunned relatives of the suspect said the tragedy stemmed from Muhammad’s long battle with mental illness and his inability to get proper treatment and stabilize his life after a seven-year prison sentence. Police officials have said they have found no links to terrorism, and hate crime experts said the shooting appeared to follow a troubling trend in recent years of mentally ill shooters acting on their own and targeting victims by race.

“He needed help,” said Malvina Howard, Muhammad’s aunt, in tears on Tuesday night. “He just gave up on whatever life he was living … Some people, their brains don’t work right.”

Police said Muhammad shot 16 rounds in less than a minute. The victims were identified on Wednesday as 34-year-old Zackary David Randalls, who was an electric utility worker, and local men Mark James Gassett, 37, and David Martin Jackson, 58. Muhammad, who was arrested shortly after the shooting, is also a suspect in a separate fatal shooting of motel security guard Carl Williams, 25, on the night of 13 April.

Muhammad served time in federal prison for drug offenses and a firearm possession charge, records show. He was previously diagnosed with some form of psychosis “with a substantial degree of paranoia”, and a federal judge in 2005 said he was suffering from a “mental disease or defect rendering him mentally incompetent”, according to court documents.

On social media, Muhammad recently posted #LETBLACKPEOPLEGO on multiple occasions, the Los Angeles Times reported. He also reportedly wrote about “black warriors” and “white devils” and referenced black nationalism and the Nation of Islam.

“I don’t know what was in his mind,” said Muhammad’s 81-year-old grandmother, who raised him, as she sat on Tuesday night in her living room, a short drive away from the crime scene. “It’s just hard for me to think about what has happened and why – the why is the most important thing I would like to know.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police cars near the scene of the shooting in Fresno, a city in California’s Central Valley. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

Her family requested that the Guardian not publish the grandmother’s name for safety reasons, citing fears she could be targeted in Fresno or by rightwing social media users online who have been digging into Muhammad’s history and calling him a terrorist.

As a local news station blasted eyewitness testimony of the shooting on her television nearby, the grandmother described how mental illness runs in the family and how her grandson was drawn to Islam at a young age, eventually giving up the family last name and changing it to Muhammad.

“I didn’t understand it,” she said, noting that the family was not religious.

The grandmother said that Muhammad’s early interest in Islam in some ways helped him mature and avoid the wrong crowd as a teen. Muhammad has spoken about the challenges of growing up around gang violence in a public access TV show he produced in Fresno.

“He was looking for a place to call home,” said Howard, 54, noting that at one point as an adolescent, Muhammad started going to a Baptist church. “I think he never really knew who he was.”

His relatives said when he was younger, he became involved in the Nation of Islam, which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group. But it wasn’t clear what role the group played in his life while he was in prison and after his release in 2014.

He was looking for a place to call home. I think he never knew who he was Malvina Howard, Muhammad’s aunt

Incarceration, Kemp said, seemed to permanently change Muhammad for the worse. After prison, she noticed him suffering from what appeared to be hallucinations. “He was like a whole new person. He just wasn’t mentally there.”

In addition to his anger about the racism he experienced – being followed around in stores, for example – Muhammad grew increasingly frustrated with how hard it was to find work and rebuild a life after prison.

“He felt like he was being held back,” his grandmother said, noting that he struggled to access mental healthcare. “I think a lot of it is the system failed him.”

Howard recalled one instance of Muhammad asking to turn the television off, because he thought someone was talking to him through the device. She said the family didn’t understand his mental illness and often felt helpless: “How do you talk about something with someone who doesn’t think anything is wrong with him?”

Muhammad, who has three children, also has white friends and has dated white women, she added.

On Sunday, days after police say Muhammad killed a motel security guard, he showed up to his grandmother’s house in tears, which she said was unusual. “He was hugging me. He was crying.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People place candles to mourn the victims in Fresno. Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images

There has been a recent increase in hate crimes in the US, including a jump in homicides, according to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The Fresno shooting, he said, appeared to follow the pattern of lone shooters motivated by racial antipathy, such as the white supremacists who targeted a Sikh temple, Dylann Roof killing nine black church members and Micah Johnson shooting police officers in Dallas.

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“The ways these things are reported, it’s as if there’s some kind of a James Bond enemy factory that creates these mechanized people,” said Levin. Instead, it’s typically a “boiling cauldron of mental illness and amplified anger that is then directed oftentimes by an amalgam of symbols and ideologies”.

While these shootings are often used to promote Islamophobia and demonize Black Lives Matter, statistics show that African Americans are still disproportionately victimized by hate crimes and that there has been a huge rise in attacks against Muslims in recent years. Research also suggests that the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence rather than perpetrators.

Kemp said she felt it was wrong for the public or the media to blame the shooting on Islam.

“My heart breaks for the families,” she added. “I don’t think there’s anything we could say to make it OK, but we are truly sorry for their loss.”

At the grandmother’s house on Tuesday, Muhammad’s father declined to talk to a reporter, saying only: “Kori is going to prison for the rest of his life.”