Exclusive Before the Parramatta shooting, one man tried to help Farhad Jabar. He tells how this ‘gentle’ boy gave him the cold shoulder at their last meeting

In his last weeks, Farhad Jabar started skipping school. Most mornings, in his school uniform, he would turn up alone to Parramatta mosque. That’s where Isaac first saw him.

“I attend the mosque on a daily basis as I’m walking to work. In the morning it’s quite empty,” Isaac says. “In the last two or three months I noticed this young person.”

A week after the death of Curtis Cheng, students at Arthur Phillip High School have remembered Jabar as quietly devout, a talented basketballer and a friendly but private classmate.

But what drove the teenager – a timid, withdrawn 15-year-old with no history of violence – remains a mystery.



Isaac, who asked for his real name to be withheld after calls by rightwing groups for attacks on Muslims, agreed to share with Guardian Australia his impressions of the young man he met in the mosque that day, and got to know over the next few months, until a “bizarre, concerning” final encounter a fortnight ago.

Jabar, in his school uniform, “stuck out” in Parramatta mosque the first morning he met Isaac. “He was just hanging out there, reading books, praying,” he says.

“It was 9am, he should have been in school … It’s not normal behaviour to isolate yourself.”

Their first encounters were frosty, but gradually the 15-year-old opened up. “He told me things weren’t going well at school, he wasn’t interested in school any more, that he was being bullied. He said he didn’t like it any more. He wasn’t interested because he wasn’t feeling good.

“He spoke about it with a sense of sorrow,” he says.

Isaac became concerned about the boy’s mental health. “Sometimes he would be quite bubbly. Sometimes he would be quite withdrawn. And those are typical signs of all sorts of mental health conditions, especially young people,” Isaac says.

“I presented my concerns to psychologists and other professionals and got some feedback. And the feedback was, these were depressive symptoms, these were symptoms of trauma, of anxiety.”

On Wednesday Isaac was still struggling to make sense of the killing of 58-year-old Curtis Cheng, a crime he said was “absolutely horrific”. He is haunted by the image of the boy, in traditional Islamic garb, waving a gun and strutting before the New South Wales police headquarters in Parramatta.

“It was a shock to the core,” he said. “[Jabar] was soft-spoken, really gentle, you got a really innocent boy-like feeling about him.

“[Friday] was the first time I’ve ever seen him in the tradition Islamic clothing. Just his mannerisms in terms of pacing up and down, trying to pump himself up, I’d never seen that sort of behaviour from him.”

In the past few weeks Isaac felt he had begun to make progress with Jabar. They arranged to have a hot chocolate. Isaac wanted to set him on the right path.

“I told him, I know you’re not happy at school, but what do you want to do with your life? I have all sorts of connections I can hook you up with. If you want to work, if you want to get into a trade, if you want to get into external study, let’s talk about it.”

He says his last encounter with Jabar, one week before the killing, was “bizarre, concerning”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Parramatta mosque where Farhad Jabar spent time in the last weeks of his life. Photograph: Richard Milnes/Demotix/Corbis

“Over the period of time that I got to know him he would greet me with a handshake followed by a hug. And he was generally always alone.

“But the last time I saw him he was with four males sitting down on the mosque floor, who I hadn’t seen before. And he saw me, but pretended not to see me, just gave me the cold shoulder.

“So I went over to the group, said to them Salaam Alaikum, peace be upon you. And he shook my hand, then brushed me off and the rest of the group didn’t respond,” he said.

“That’s a big deal in the Islamic faith. One of the rights you have upon a fellow Muslim is to greet them with the best greeting. But he responded really coldly. I got the sense he didn’t want the others to know we had an interaction going on.”

He discovered that Jabar was behind Friday’s shooting on Saturday, when photos of the teenager first circulated. “Honestly, it was as if my heart dropped. I was lost for words,” he says.

He is bitter about the way Parramatta mosque has been “dragged through the mud” in the past week. The prayer hall is known for its emphasis on community service, and he says the sermons are deeply spiritual and inspiring.



“They lift you up as a human, you could never draw any negative connotations from them. You could never draw any connection between what’s preached and anyone getting a radical idea.”

He had seen Jabar as a young man looking to be guided. “He was so vulnerable and so mentally confused or unwell that he was so easily susceptible to any figure of acceptance or group acceptance,” he says.

“As a young person growing up in Australia, especially if you’re of an ethnic background, what are you looking for? Acceptance, identity.”



Isaac says mental illness is still poorly understood within some Muslim communities, as it is in many other parts of society.



“[We] need to understand the religious and cultural implications that mental health has. A young Muslim person battling depression isn’t going to go out and talk about it.



“It’s seen as something, within the context of the community, it doesn’t feed into the notion of being a man, of being resilient.”

Isaac has passed what he knows to authorities. He is helping to organise a conference on mental health in an Islamic cultural context, work that has now taken on a new significance.