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The geeky, gangly teen was just like any other student on the Colorado State University campus in 1990.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” one dean said in an interview years later about 19-year-old Anwar al-Awlaki. “He blended in perfectly.”
The brainy nerd wasn’t even strict about his religion, said a student who recalled his successful run for president of the Muslim Student Association.
“I remember Anwar saying, ‘[The other candidate] would want your mom to cover her face. I’m not like that,’ ” the student told one interviewer.
Yet a little more than a decade later, the popular preacher in California, Colorado and Virginia — called an “all-American boy” by his father — changed into a hate-spewing al Qaeda recruiter.
The heinous transformation began with America’s war on terror, which saw the inspirational, Web-savvy cleric transform into a bloodthirsty terrorist linked to the Fort Hood Army-base killings and a string of failed bomb plots.
It seemed unthinkable in the days following 9/11.
“We came here to build, not to destroy,” the imam told his Falls Church, Va., congregation — building a reputation, whether sincere or not, as a peacemaker in a jittery post-9/11 world. “We are the bridge between America and 1 billion Muslims worldwide.”
“Our hearts bleed for the attacks that targeted the World Trade Center as well as other institutions in the United States.”
Yet less than nine years later, a venomous Awlaki declared war.
“America, as a whole, has turned into a nation of evil,” he said from Yemen in 2010. “Jihad against America is binding upon myself as it is binding on every other able Muslim.”
Suddenly, Awlaki was the voice of al Qaeda — the Osama bin Laden of the Internet.
It was an unlikely role for the ambitious Awlaki, who was born in Las Cruces, NM, in 1971, while his Yemeni father was attending New Mexico State University.
Descended from a rich and powerful southern Yemeni clan, Awlaki spent his first seven years in the United States, returned to Yemen and a traditionally strict Muslim rearing during his adolescence, and then returned to America for college.
It was at Colorado State University in Fort Collins where the grad student began to preach, drawing a young, appreciative, and decidedly Western audience.
“He was pretty reserved, tried to come off more intellectual than emotional,” Taj Ashaheed, a spokesman for the Colorado Muslim Council told the Denver Post last year.
“He was kind of bookish, nerdish. Most people had the impression he was Western in his ways. His accent wasn’t that thick. His Arabic was really good … There is that question, if it is true … We are like: What the hell happened to the dude? This is not the dude we listened to.”
Awlaki also preached in San Diego briefly, where one neighbor remembered him fondly — and then ominously.
“You couldn’t ask for nicer neighbors,” he told CNN of Awlaki and his wife and two young children.
But then he recalled to Newsweek: “He came over [in 2001] before he left and told me that something very big was going to happen, and that he had to be out of the country when it happened.”
Whether Awlaki was informed of the 9/11 attacks was never proven, but two of his congregants from Virginia were among the hijackers.
San Diego also proved the place where Awlaki gave in to the Western temptations he so often spoke out against; he was busted twice for soliciting prostitutes, and was released on probation.
Awlaki’s last preacher post in the US was at the Dar al-Hirjah mosque in Falls Church, Va., the biggest of its kind in the Washington, DC, area.
There, too, he became known for his sermons and his lectures on Islam, which were sold around the world on audio CDs — and posted for millions of worshipers in the house of YouTube.
At first his message was conservative, traditional — and tolerant.
But after 9/11, things changed, and he became angry at an anti-Muslim backlash.
He moved overseas with his wife and kids, first to London, and later to Yemen, where he was arrested in 2006 — detained by Yemeni officials who questioned him, on the FBI’s behalf, about possible links to terrorists.
Prison changed him, his father said.
“They put him in jail for 18 months, and I detected a change after he got out of prison; he began to get away from the mainstream,” Nasser al-Awlaki told CNN.
To the world, the tolerant imam-turned-terror-mouthpiece urged Muslims: “Don’t consult with anybody in killing the Americans. Fighting the devil doesn’t require consultation or prayers seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils.”