from SFGate.com, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle:
"At 29, Popal still lived with his parents in Fremont. His mother was especially sheltering, seeing the world as filled with "evil people" and trying to keep Popal from being harmed, said his cousin, Hamid Nekrawesh.
"Since he was a little kid, they had been overly controlling of him," he said. "They tried to keep him away from evil situations, in their mind, and that had a negative effect on him. He just didn't have any friend or anyone to talk to except Mom and Dad."
"Last spring, Popal was voluntary committed to Kaiser Medical Center in Fremont after a breakdown on brought by a dream of "the devil taking him to a graveyard and trying to kill him," Nekrawesh said."
Popal seems to have been acting on his own and not as part of a terrorist cell. No information has been released about his religious life: what mosque he attended, whether he had become more "fervent" in his beliefs since his return from Afghanistan.
His religion does seem to have fed into his paranoia, much as Andrea Yates' Christian beliefs fed into hers. I do suspect--and it's nothing more than that--that he specifically targeted the Jewish Community Center because he picked up the belief that the Jews are responsible for all the problems in the Muslim world.
Meanwhile, I'll be carrying ID when I walk during lunchtime. I'm sure Popal is not the only paranoid person with a driver's license in the Bay Area.
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