Omar Mateen

• 1. Introduction

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  At about 2:22 in the morning on the 12th of June 2016, a man inside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, dialed 911. He was Omar Mateen. He told the dispatcher he was a soldier and pledged his loyalty to the leader of the Islamic State. Behind him lay a gay nightclub where 49 people were killed and 58 others wounded, 53 of them by gunfire. It was the deadliest mass shooting in American history until the Las Vegas Strip shooting on the 1st of October 2017. It remains the deadliest known act of violence against LGBT people in the United States. Mateen was an American citizen, born in New York, who had a security guard's license, a concealed carry permit and no adult criminal record. How did a boy with a thick file of school troubles end up legally armed? Why did the FBI, which had looked at him twice, let him go? And what do the many competing explanations of his motive actually rest on?

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• 2. Classrooms in Florida

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  A third grade teacher at Mariposa Elementary School in St. Lucie County, Florida, described a pupil who was constantly in motion. The teacher noted that he was verbally abusive, aggressive and rude, and that he talked often about violence and sex. The boy was Omar Mir Seddique, born on the 16th of November 1986 at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, New York. His parents were Afghan. His father, Mir Seddique Mateen, came from Herat, emigrated in the 1980s and became a naturalized US citizen on the 17th of November 1989. The couple had four children, and the family moved to Port St. Lucie, Florida, in 1991. Their home life was not calm. His mother, Shahla Mateen, was taken into custody on the night of the 7th of December 2002 after allegedly attacking her husband while he brushed his teeth.

  Neighbors and acquaintances later called the family moderate Muslims and "all-American." School records and recollections tell a harder story. By seventh grade, staff had moved the boy into a separate class to avoid conflicts with other students. One classmate remembered a bully who was disrespectful to girls. Another said he himself was picked on over his weight and his Afghan heritage. Reports described his parents as dismissive of the complaints, and his father reportedly had a reputation for brushing off teachers, especially women. In 1999, his eighth grade teacher wrote to the father about an attitude problem and an inability to show self-control.

  High school began at Martin County High School in 2000. At 14 he was expelled after a fight in math class. He was briefly arrested, without handcuffs, and charged with battery and disrupting school, though the charges were later dropped. He then attended Spectrum, an alternative school for students with behavioral issues. Classmates told The Washington Post that he cheered for the hijackers on the day of the September 11 attacks and claimed Osama bin Laden was his uncle. His father came to collect him and slapped him in the face, and the school suspended him for five days. A retired dean, Dan Alley, said staff tried to counsel the teenager but his father would not back the school. After another fight he was sent to St. Lucie West Centennial High School. He graduated in 2003 from Martin County's Stuart Adult Vocational School, having been suspended for 48 days in total. The New York Times reported that, soon after the attacks, he startled students on his school bus by mimicking an exploding plane.

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• 3. The Armed Guard

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  In 2006, Mateen earned an Associate of Science degree in criminal justice technology from Indian River State College. On a questionnaire for the program he admitted being involved in a crime that went undetected, but gave no details. That October he started as a recruit with the Florida Department of Corrections, assigned to the Martin Correctional Institution. His application included a letter explaining his arrest at 14, and it also mentioned that he had experimented with marijuana as a young teenager. The job lasted only months. After the Virginia Tech shooting in April 2007, he suggested in a training class that he might bring a gun to class. The warden, P.H. Skipper, called the remark at best extremely disturbing. On the 27th of April 2007, Mateen was involuntarily dismissed and never became a certified officer.

  In September 2007, he joined the British-based security firm G4S Secure Solutions in Jupiter, Florida, and stayed until his death. In 2010, while working for G4S, he was interviewed for The Big Fix, a 2012 documentary about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He accused cleanup workers of caring only about pay and even hoping for more disaster to keep their jobs.

  Florida law required the company to obtain either a full psychiatric evaluation or a validated written psychological test before he could carry a weapon on the job. The test used was the updated Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, known as the MMPI-2. It asks people to agree or disagree with statements such as "My soul sometimes leaves my body." The psychologist named on G4S's certification to the state was Carol Nudelman. After the shooting she denied ever meeting Mateen, saying she had ended her Florida practice in January 2006. G4S said no psychologist had interviewed him. His test had been scored by the firm that bought her practice, Headquarters for Psychological Evaluation.

  On the 10th of September 2016, Florida's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services fined G4S $151,400 for providing inaccurate psychological testing information. Between 2006 and 2016, 1,514 forms had wrongly listed Nudelman's name, and Mateen's was among those investigated. G4S called it a clerical error and said he had actually been cleared by Dr. Syed Shafeeq Rahman, a family physician with close ties to the Mateen family. Rahman was also imam of the Fort Pierce mosque the family attended. He had not interviewed Mateen either, only evaluated the test results.

  Supervisors did see trouble. G4S pulled Mateen from a courthouse post after he threatened coworkers, including a claim that he would have al-Qaeda kill a deputy's family. Mateen said the deputies were making racist comments to him. G4S nonetheless kept him on and moved him to a kiosk at a gated community in Palm Beach County, without telling the community or its property management company why. By then he held a concealed carry permit and an armed guard license. His licensing records showed a proficient shooter, who scored at or above the 98th percentile with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol.

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• 4. Marriages and Travels

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  In 2006, Mateen filed a petition adding Mateen as his surname, to match his parents' name. Three years later, in April 2009, he married Sitora Alisherzoda Yusufiy, an Uzbekistan-born woman he had met on Myspace in 2008. They separated after four months and divorced in July 2011. After the shooting, she told media outlets that he was mentally unstable, beat her and kept her cut off from her family. She also said he was bipolar, though no one had diagnosed him, and that he had used steroids.

  He met his second wife, Noor Zahi Salman, on an online dating site in 2011. They married on the 29th of September 2011 in Hercules, California. She moved into his Fort Pierce home in November 2012, and by September 2013 they lived in Port St. Lucie with his father and another relative. By December 2015 she had left to join relatives in Rodeo, California. They had a son, who was three at the time of his father's death. Salman said he turned physically and verbally abusive about six months into the marriage, but was kinder in the final weeks.

  Mateen also traveled abroad. He spent eight days in Saudi Arabia in March 2011 and ten days there in March 2012. The second trip was organized by the Islamic Center at New York University. It included twelve New York City police officers and groups from Columbia and Yale, and it visited Mecca and Medina. He also went to the United Arab Emirates around that time. FBI Director James Comey said Saudi officials had helped investigate the trips. In June 2016, the House Intelligence Committee said investigators were still searching for details.

  Acquaintances gave starkly different portraits. A former coworker at the gated community called him "unhinged and unstable." That coworker said he made homophobic, racist and sexist remarks, talked about killing people, and was reported to G4S several times. Another resident of the community remembered him as "very polite." Imam Rahman said Mateen came to the mosque three or four times a week, as recently as two days before the shooting, and prayed quietly and left.

  The father, Mir Seddique Mateen, insisted the attack had nothing to do with religion. He said he had seen his son grow angry after watching a gay couple kiss in front of his family at the Bayside Marketplace in Miami months earlier. The father had run his own company, The Durand Jirga, Inc., founded in 2010 in Port St. Lucie. In 2015, on a California-based satellite channel, he hosted a political show that denounced the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and the Pakistani government. In the show he presented himself as a candidate for president of Afghanistan and expressed gratitude toward the Taliban.

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• 5. Watched by the FBI

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  In May 2013, the FBI opened an investigation after Mateen made inflammatory remarks to coworkers while working as a guard. He claimed his family was linked to al-Qaeda and that he had joined Hezbollah. The two groups are rivals of each other and of the Islamic State, a contradiction Director Comey later noted. Agents interviewed Mateen twice. He admitted the statements but said he made them in anger because coworkers were teasing him. After ten months the FBI closed the case and judged him not to be a threat. He had been placed on a terrorist watch list while the inquiry ran, and was removed afterward.

  He returned to the bureau's attention in July 2014. Moner Mohammad Abu Salha, an American who had traveled to Syria, committed a suicide bombing there in late May 2014. Mateen had known him, and the two attended the same mosque. The investigation continued, but law-enforcement officials told The Wall Street Journal that it focused on Abu Salha rather than Mateen.

  After the attack, the picture of his allegiances stayed muddled. Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the Department of Homeland Security believed Mateen had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. Analysts cautioned that it was anyone's guess how involved he had been with either al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. Mateen had also pledged support for a suicide bomber who claimed to represent the al-Nusra Front, a Syrian branch of al-Qaeda and an opponent of the Islamic State. A survivor said he talked about wanting the United States to stop bombing his country.

  Investigators found that his computer had been used to watch extremist videos, including beheadings, and to seek information on the Islamic State. His wife knew about the videos. She did not think much of it, since the FBI seemed to have cleared him. Another detail from the bureau's files concerned his own father. Seddique Mateen had acted at times as a secret FBI informant between January 2005 and June 2016.

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• 6. Questions of Identity

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  Within days of the attack, a rumor spread that the gunman had himself been gay or bisexual. A man who attended police academy with Mateen in 2006 said they had gone to gay clubs together and that Mateen once expressed interest in dating him. Club-goers recalled him dancing with another man. A classmate said Mateen once asked him if he was gay. The FBI investigated many of these claims and found no reasonable evidence to settle the question of his sexual orientation.

  The Orlando Sentinel and The Palm Beach Post reported that at least five regular customers at Pulse had seen him there on at least a dozen occasions. Some described him drinking alone in a corner, others a drunk, loud and belligerent patron. One witness who recognized him outside the club an hour before the shooting said Mateen had messaged him for about a year on a gay dating app called Jack'd. That witness handed his phone and login details to the FBI. A third witness said Mateen had tried to pick up men at the club. Dozens of others told the Tampa Bay Times they had never seen him there. A spokesperson for owner Barbara Poma called the claim that he was a regular "untrue and totally ridiculous."

  The family's reactions kept shifting. His father first asked why a gay man would do such a thing, then said two days later that he had seen nothing and did not believe it. The ex-wife told Brazilian television station SBT Brazil that the father once called his son gay in her presence. Asked directly, she told The Wall Street Journal she did not know. She did say he felt strongly about homosexuality and had admitted going to nightclubs. In an online video, recorded in his native language during Ramadan, the father said God would punish the gay and lesbian issue. He added that the servants of God should have nothing to do with it.

  By late June, the reporting had turned against the rumors. On the 16th of June, The New York Times said the FBI was skeptical. On the 18th, it added that federal officials had found no evidence in his effects or online presence to back the claims. The Los Angeles Times reported on the 23rd that the bureau found nothing to support claims of gay lovers or dating-app contact. A man calling himself "Miguel" said he had been Mateen's lover for two months and that the massacre was revenge against Latino men after a possible HIV exposure. Investigators did not find him credible, and Mateen's autopsy showed he was HIV-negative. On the 25th of June, The New York Times reported that Adam4Adam, another gay dating network, had concluded he never used its app, and a spokesman called the reports a hoax. After 500 interviews, the FBI found no evidence in his web searches, emails or other electronic data. The bureau did find evidence that he had cheated on his wife with other women.

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• 7. Weeks of Preparation

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  About two months before the attack, Mateen transferred his share of a Port St. Lucie home to his sister and brother-in-law for only $10. Two weeks before the shooting, he legally bought a SIG Sauer SIG MCX semi-automatic rifle and a 9mm Glock 17 handgun from a gun shop in Port St. Lucie. These were the two weapons used at Pulse. He also tried to buy body armor, but the first store did not stock what he wanted. Several weeks before the attack, at another gun shop, he sought body armor and 1,000 rounds of bulk ammunition. The staff grew suspicious and turned him away. A salesperson there said he contacted the FBI, but federal officials had no record of a report, and the local sheriff's office knew of no such incident.

  Between the 1st and the 6th of June, during the Gay Days 2016 celebrations around Orlando, he visited both Disney Springs and Pulse. Disney Springs has looser security than the Disney theme parks. Officials said he also went to an unspecified Walt Disney World park with his wife. A Kissimmee mosque released video that seemed to show him praying there for about ten minutes on the 8th of June. On the evening before the attack, he searched online for nightclub locations in Orlando.

  Before dawn on the 12th of June, he wrote Facebook posts demanding that America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic State. His last post warned that attacks in the United States were coming within days. The posts were later deleted, and the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs uncovered them. Hours earlier he had visited his father, who noticed nothing strange. He also gave his wife, Noor Salman, $1,000 and let her go to visit her mother in California.

  Salman became the only person tried over the attack. On the 14th of June, NBC News reported that she told the FBI she had once driven him to Pulse because he wanted to scope it out. The FBI knew almost immediately this was untrue, because cell phone location records contradicted it. An official told the Associated Press that authorities believed she knew about the plot. She had gone with him on a shopping trip where he bought ammunition, while she was elsewhere buying a child's toy. She also warned him the evening before not to do anything he might be planning. She was arrested in California five months after the massacre and held in jail awaiting trial. On the 30th of March 2018, an Orlando jury found her not guilty because the prosecution had not met its burden of proof. The foreman said jurors felt she had vague foreknowledge of her husband's intentions. The FBI agent's interrogation had gone untaped, so jurors never saw or heard it.

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• 8. The Night at Pulse

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  At about 2:02 a.m., Mateen entered Pulse and began shooting. During his 911 call, he named the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and told the dispatcher the shooting was triggered by an airstrike in Iraq. The strike had killed an Islamic State commander, Abu Waheeb, six weeks earlier. According to FBI officials, he made two other 911 calls during the standoff. He also phoned News 13 of Orlando, and The Washington Post reported he said he had carried out the attack for the Islamic State. The group later released a statement through Amaq News Agency taking responsibility.

  Around 4 a.m., he threatened police that he would collapse the whole building with explosive vests, which he said were fitted to hostages and placed at strategic corners. Police arrived, he took hostages, and a gunfight followed. At about 5:14 a.m. officers shot and killed him, ending the shooting. He was reported to have fired at least 110 rounds over the course of the event.

  An autopsy found that police had shot him eight times, in the head, chest, abdomen, calf, feet and toe. The bullets, fired from a short distance, passed through from front to back, which suggested he was facing the officers. The examiners also found lacerations and blunt-force injuries, including bruising and scrapes on his torso, though they could not tell where those wounds came from. No alcohol or illegal drugs were detected in his system. He was wearing two pairs of socks. Mateen was buried in the Muslim Cemetery of South Florida, in Hialeah Gardens.

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