[The Guardian] 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.But according to the Champ, this sort of violence only happens in the States.
"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But what drove the teenager -- a timid, withdrawn 15-year-old with no history of violence -- remains a mystery.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 Sometimes he would be quite withdrawn.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."