This is an update of thestory I posted a week ago from Tennessee about how a man described as a truck driver, for reasons supposedly still unknown, stabbed to death three women at a Pilot truck stop in Knox County.
Mama says he wasn’t mentally ill! Seems that leaves only one explanation, right!
Did Knox County Pilot attacker commit another stabbing in Millington?
Did the man who killed three employees at a Pilot Travel Center in Knox County also stab a nurse nearly to death outside a mental health clinic in Millington, Tennessee?
Millington Police Chief Mark Dunbar said a mugshot of Idris Abdus-Salaam, the 33-year-old deemed responsible for last week’s triple homicide, resembles a sketch of the man who committed perhaps the most bizarre, brutal attack he’s seen in his decades-long career.
No one else witnessed the attack, Dunbar said. No camera caught it on video.
Investigators had nothing to go on but the words of a woman who had been stabbed over and over by a man she had never met.
Still, the nurse did well in helping police create a sketch of her attacker, Dunbar said.
The chief stressed that, although he believes the sketch resembles a 2018 booking photo of Abdus-Salaam, “that doesn’t mean it’s the same individual. We’re working with TBI trying to backtrack this,” he added, “and there may not be anything to it.”
Although police said at the time the Millington suspect might have been mentally ill, that statement was based more on common sense than concrete evidence, Dunbar said.
“If you stab somebody that you don’t know,” the chief said, “you’ve got a problem.”
Much remains unknown about Abdus-Salaam and what sparked the attack at the Pilot. Authorities said he killed Joyce Whaley, 57; Patricia Denise Nibbe, 51; and Nettie Spencer, 41.
Abdus-Salaam’s mother, Walidah Abdus-Salaam, told Knox News his family had no indication he was mentally ill. She described her son as a practicing Muslim and said she didn’t believe he had become radicalized by any sort of religious fanaticism.
The TBI initially described Abdus-Salaam as a truck driver from Durham, North Carolina, but on Wednesday wouldn’t comment on the details of his employment history.
The agency also declined to comment on whether he had ever been treated at a mental facility, as well as whether mental illness might have been a factor in the violence.
“That is part of our investigation,” a spokeswoman said in response to several questions from Knox News.
