His parents realized there was a problem as early as 2005 when he returned home from college for the Christmas holiday and got in a heated argument about Islam with his sister’s husband. During that argument his personality took a very different turn from the son they knew.
Later on he made another visit and during that he pulled all the Rev. MLK memorabilia off his bedroom walls. When questioned about that he informed them he had converted. Concerned, they went to Nashville to find out what was going on and found out they’d been deceived. He hadn’t told them when he had that first argument over Islam that he had earlier dropped out of college. He apparently let them think he was still a student. He not only dropped out, he took a job working with muslims and he out of character for him, he dumped his dog because it was considered ‘unclean.’
He was being slowly recruited. They persuaded him to discard his identity and adopt an Islamic name. He quit visiting the family, becoming more isolated. The recruiters eventually persuaded him to go to what they told him was a British school in South Yemen to teach English and he would get to leave to go on the hajj, travel where he wanted, etc. By this time the FBI was already watching him but the family didn’t know that, they only knew the son was being led astray, and there’s so much PC no one wants to address the problem of Islamic radicalization in colleges.
They still had hopes of winning him back from Islam in 2008, but didn’t realize just how radical he’d become under further influence in the Yemeni jail in which he’d ended up.