Hadi Matar had resented being pushed to pursue schoolwork. At 24, he worked a low-level job at a discount store, made clumsy attempts at boxing and became increasingly focused on religion. Now, accused of trying to kill a pre-eminent figure of free expression, Matar has lost the support even of his mother.
“I’m done with him,” Silvana Fardos said in a brief interview, disavowing Matar, who is accused of repeatedly stabbing Salman Rushdie in a brazen daytime attack at an intellectual retreat in western New York.
This week, a portrait of Matar as a troubled recluse began to emerge. Fardos said she had not talked to him since he was charged with attempting to kill Rushdie on Friday. The writer has lived in and out of hiding since Iran’s supreme leader in 1989 issued an edict calling for his death after he published The Satanic Verses, which provoked outrage among some Muslims.The FBI, which is leading the investigation, has disclosed no clear motive for the attack.
As national and international news crews continued to hover outside Fardos’s northern New Jersey house on Tuesday, she confirmed that her son had returned from a 2018 trip to West Asia a changed man — reclusive and increasingly focused on his role as a follower of Islam.
“I have nothing to say to him,” Fardos said on Monday as she walked quickly towards the two-storey brick home in Fairview, asking for privacy, her face shielded by a mask, glasses and hat.Matar, whose lawyer Nathaniel L. Barone II has entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf, remains jailed. Barone, a public defender, said he expected a grand jury to consider formal charges against his client in the next several days.“In these situations where emotions run high, feelings run high, it’s important that the criminal justice system is still at its best,” Barone said on Tuesday.
“This is the opportunity for Mr Matar to receive every benefit from our Constitution — a presumption of innocence, due process, a fair trial.”Matar’s family came to America from Lebanon, settling first in California before his parents’ marriage dissolved. Matar’s father returned to the village of Yaroun. In New Jersey, where Fardos and her three children have lived for several years after moving from California, opinions about Matar were formed well before last week.Acquaintances and relatives described a man who preferred to remain at the fringes of daily life.“He’s the cliché of the loner,” said Desmond Boyle, who owns a small, garage-style gym where Matar was learning to box.
Matar had worked at a Marshalls clothing store before his arrest, a company official said. His mother told The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, in an interview that she confirmed Tuesday, that he went months without speaking to her or his siblings. He blamed her for encouraging him to focus on academics rather than religious studies.Jorge Diaz said he often attended the same 6.30pm class as Matar at the State of Fitness Boxing Club, a gym in North Bergen, New Jersey, about 3km from Matar’s house.
“Always, like, isolated,” Diaz, 34, said. “Always by himself — very quiet.”Unlike most beginning students, Matar had arrived in April prepared to register immediately, without first taking a sample class as most students do, said the club’s manager, Rosaria Calabrese.Polite and reserved, he kept almost entirely to himself, rarely speaking above a whisper, several students and instructors said.Boyle said he had pulled Matar aside at least twice to engage him, an effort that fell flat. Boyle, a firefighter, said that decades as a recovering alcoholic had made him especially attuned to “working with those who need help”.
“It looked like the saddest day of his life,” Boyle said in an interview, “but he came in looking like that every day.”“You can tell he grew up quiet,” he added. “Maybe a little bit on the outside. Never really fitting in.”Matar had little boxing experience — “two left feet”, Boyle said — and made limited progress during the 27 sessions he attended in the brick-lined workout space filled with punching bags that hang suspended from the ceiling.Three days before the attack, he had cancelled his monthly membership to State of Fitness — a $158 package that permitted unlimited classes and practice time, Calabrese said.“He was saying, ‘I can’t come back right now,’” she said.
