ORLANDO Shootings
We’re told police waited for three hours for more personnel and an armored vehicle to arrive.
When a young American man from coastal Florida drove a truck packed with explosives into a hilltop restaurant in Syria in May 2014,F.B.I. agents scoured his online postings and interviewed his contacts in Florida in a scramble to determine who, if anyone, might try to launch a similar attack inside the United States.
One of the people they spoke to was Omar Mateen, a young security guard from a nearby town who had attended the same mosque as the suicide bomber and had been on a terrorism watch list for incendiary comments he once made to co-workers at a local courthouse. But the F.B.I. soon ended its examination of Mr. Mateen after finding no evidence that he posed a terrorist threat to his community.
That hopeful conclusion was upended in a bloody spasm of violence early Sunday morning when Mr. Mateen fatally shot dozens of people at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla., before being killed by police officers who stormed the club to end the standoff. The horrific events at the Pulse nightclub left 49 dead and have left family members, neighbors and federal investigators trying to piece together clues about what might have led Mr. Mateen, 29, to carry out such unspeakable violence.
The government investigation could take months, but an early examination of Mr. Mateen’s life reveals a hatred of gay people and a stew of contradictions. He was a man who could be charming, loved Afghan music and enjoyed dancing, but he was also violently abusive. Family members said he was not overly religious, but he was rigid and conservative in his view that his wife should remain mostly at home. The F.B.I. director said on Monday that Mr. Mateen had once claimed ties to both Al Qaeda and Hezbollah — two radical groups violently opposed to each other.
Investigators now face the question of how much the killings were the act of a deeply disturbed man, as his former wife and others described him, and how much he was driven by religious or political ideology. Whatever drove him to carry out the shootings, his actions highlight the difficulty for the American government in trying to address a new style of terrorism — random acts of violence that may have been at least partly inspired by the Islamic State but were not directed by the group’s leaders.
Unlike Al Qaeda, which favors highly organized and planned operations, the Islamic State has encouraged anyone to take up arms in its name, and uses a sophisticated campaign of social media to inspire future attacks by unstable individuals with little history of embracing radical Islam. President Obama said Monday that there was no evidence that the Islamic State actually directed Sunday’s attack, which would make Mr. Mateen’s case part of a pattern of domestic radicalization.
A Year Alongside Omar Mateen
Daniel Gilroy, a former co-worker of Omar Mateen, describes what he calls “unstable” and at times frightening behavior.
By DAN RUETENIK and ROBIN LINDSAY on June 14, 2016. . Watch in Times Video »
American officials have said that those under surveillance in the United States for possible ties to the group usually have little terrorism expertise or outside support, which makes thwarting an Islamic State-inspired attack less like stopping a traditional act of terrorism and more like trying to prevent a shooting at a school or movie theater.
The son of Afghan immigrants, Mr. Mateen was born in New York in 1986, moved to Florida with his family in 1991 and spent his early years there in the Port St. Lucie area near the state’s east coast. He made friends as a child at a local mosque, and built friendships during slumber parties and basketball games, and playing video games. He bounced between jobs in high school and college. In court documents connected to a 2006 name change — from Omar Mir Seddique to Omar Mir Seddique Mateen — he said he had held eight jobs in about four years, including work as a grocer and as a salesman at a computer store.
He earned an associate degree in criminal justice technology from Indian River State College in 2006, the year he began working for the Florida Department of Corrections at a facility just west of Port St. Lucie.
He left that job six months later, and within six months he had found work with G4S, a large private security company that has won large government contracts for work both in the United States and abroad. He was assigned to protect at least two properties during his years at the firm: PGA Village, a golf club, and the St. Lucie County Courthouse complex.
Mr. Mateen had a home in Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic Coast. On Monday morning, a reporter told the police that the house’s sliding glass back door was open. Officers went to the home and “discovered the door open, possibly by force, creating suspicion of a burglary,” a police spokesman said. “Detectives will follow up to determine if, in fact, it was a burglary.”
Mr. Mateen met his future wife, Sitora Yusufiy, on MySpace in 2008. Both were on the site looking for love and eventually marriage, and she was drawn to him because of his alluring and funny messages.
During an interview Monday at her home in Boulder, Colo., Ms. Yusufiy said he seemed perfect — American enough for her free spirit and Muslim enough to please her traditional family.
“This man was a simple, Americanized guy that was also from my culture. And, you know, had the same religion,” she said. “So I was like, O.K., this could potentially satisfy my parents.”
She moved to Florida, and they married in a quiet courthouse ceremony in 2009, but the short-lived marriage was marred by violence and isolation, she said. She had no friends or family in Florida, and Mr. Mateen preferred that she stay in the house.
She said he sometimes returned from work angry and agitated, including one night when she fell asleep on the floor waiting for him to return home.
“All I remember is being woken up by a pillow being taken from under my head,” she said. “I hit my head on the ground and then he started pulling my hair.”
“He almost killed me,” she said. “Because he started choking me. And I somehow got out of it and I tried to tackle him.”
Orlando
FLORIDA
408
Orlando Regional Medical Center
441
Site of shooting
Pulse nightclub
Conway
527
4
Edgewood
Oak Ridge
2 Miles
She said that Mr. Mateen might have been gay but chose to hide his true identity out of anger and shame. A senior federal law enforcement official said on Monday that the F.B.I. was looking at reports that Mr. Mateen had used a gay dating app, and patrons of Pulse were quoted in news reports as saying that he had visited the club several times.
Ms. Yusufiy said that her ex-husband had told her that he frequented nightclubs before their marriage, but that he did not tell her they were gay clubs.
The couple separated within a year, and in 2011 Mr. Mateen filed for divorce. In the court filing, Mr. Mateen said the marriage was “irretrievably broken.” He did not elaborate.
He came to the F.B.I.’s attention in 2013, when some of his co-workers reported that he had made inflammatory comments claiming connections to overseas terrorists, and saying he hoped that the F.B.I. would raid his family’s home so that he could become a martyr.
The F.B.I. opened an investigation and put Mr. Mateen on a terrorist watch list for nearly a year.
James Comey, the F.B.I. director, said during a news conference on Monday that agents used various methods to investigate Mr. Mateen, including sending an undercover informant who made contact with the suspect, wiretapping his conversations and scrutinizing his personal and financial records.
They also sought help from Saudi intelligence officials to learn more about his trips to the kingdom in 2011 and 2012 for the Umrah, a sacred pilgrimage to Mecca made by Muslims. More than 11,000 Americans make pilgrimages to Mecca each year, and Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. found no “derogatory” information about his trips.
During interviews with F.B.I. agents, according to Mr. Comey, Mr. Mateen said he had made the incendiary remarks “in anger” because his co-workers had ridiculed his Muslim background and he wanted to scare them. The F.B.I. closed its investigation and took him off the terrorist watch list.
But two months later, in July 2014, his name resurfaced in connection with the young man from coastal Florida, Moner Mohammad Abusalha, who had traveled to Syria and carried out the suicide bombing at the hilltop restaurant. During the course of that investigation, F.B.I. agents learned that the two men had attended the same mosque and knew each other “casually,” Mr. Comey said.
The F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Mateen a third time, but determined that his ties to the suicide bomber were not significant. The bureau had no further contact with Mr. Mateen.
Mr. Comey defended the work of his agents, although the bureau’s handling of the case is likely to be the subject of scrutiny and criticism in the coming weeks.
Still, cases such as these rankle F.B.I. counterterrorism agents, who believe they draw criticism for any choices they make — either for leaving cases open too long, or for closing cases that don’t seem to have enough evidence.
Don Borelli, a retired F.B.I. counterterrorism supervisor in New York, said there was a danger in criticizing agents who close investigations for lack of evidence.
Graphic: What Happened Inside the Orlando Nightclub
“Can we allow people’s futures to be affected if there is no proven basis for it? That’s the flip side to all this,” he said.
Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general, told reporters on Monday that the Justice Department might look to adopt new procedures that would alert counterterrorism investigators if someone who had been on a terror watch list tried to buy a gun.
Mr. Mateen bought the two weapons used in the attack just this month, officials said. “One would have liked to have known about it,” Ms. Yates said.
Federal investigators are now left to sift through disparate clues in search of any clear motive for Sunday’s killings.
The Islamic State has tried to turn the bloody event into a propaganda coup, and on Monday the group’s daily news bulletin boasted about the great victory carried out by “our brother, Omar Mateen.”
Mr. Mateen’s father, Seddique Mir Mateen, was unequivocal on Monday that his son had committed an “act of terrorism.” But the elder Mr. Mateen and other family members said they were still puzzled why a young man who had never been particularly religious is now being tied to the Islamic State’s murderous ideology.
They said that at this point they can find no easy explanations.
“Why did he do this?” his father asked. “He was born in America. He went to school in America. He went to college — why did he do that?”
“I am as puzzled as you are.”
At some point, Mateen retreated to one of the washrooms at the rear of the club where he apparently took several hostages. Somehow, more than 100 people are shot – about half of those fatally – while police are not able to help at all. We don’t hear about more police entering the club apart from those three (at least not in reports I’ve seen).
CNN reports it this way: “Shooting erupts at Pulse, a gay nightclub in the heart of Orlando, as some 320 people enjoy the club’s “Latin flavor” event. An officer working extra duty in full uniform at the club responds. He and two officers nearby open fire on the shooter, and a gun battle ensues. The shooter goes inside the club, where a hostage situation develops. Some 100 officers from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the Orlando Police Department respond to the chaotic scene.”
According to the Orlando Sentinel two more officers arrived and entered the club:
“Lt. Scott Smith and Sgt. Jeffrey Backhaus arrived a couple minutes later and rushed into the club. There was another flurry of shots between them and Mateen.”
It sounds from these reports that the rest of the 100 officers remained outside after Mateen entered the club. According to police, it wasn’t until 5 a.m. (the first shots were at 2:02 a.m.) when Mateen told them he had some kind of explosive device on him that they decided to breach the building by ramming it with an armored vehicle.
How could critically wounded people inside the club be left without help for that long, and how many died because of it? Were all the wounded rescued while the shooter was in one of the bathrooms with hostages? Police do claim to have removed “dozens and dozens” from the club at that point. But we hear stories about the gunman moving around, not simply sitting in the washroom for the whole three hours. Police explained that they could not move against the shooter more quickly because they had to “get armored vehicles on the scene and make sure they had enough personnel.”
According to a floor plan of the club filed with the City of Orlando, there were five exits that opened onto the parking lot and another three that gave access to the patio. That’s eight ways to get out and just one shooter.
Or did the shooter have help? Several witnesses have stated that they believe there was more than one shooter. One audio record of shots was played on Fox News that sounded like shots were so rapid that they could have been happening simultaneously, suggesting multiple gunmen (I’m not a firearms expert, so I hesitate to draw firm conclusions from this recording). Witness Chris Hansen (one of those carrying an injured person towards the club) said the shots were much too rapid to have come from one gun. Janiel Gonzalez told journalists that he was sure there were at least two gunmen. This is awfully reminiscent of claims of multiple shooters at the Aurora theater shooting.
In an audio interview, Gonzales talked about the struggle by club-goers to get out of the building while the shooting was going on. Just before the audio cuts out, he made this remarkable statement: “There was a guy there that was trying to prevent the door … hold the door closed so that we didn’t exit and …” (More here: https://www.sott.net/article/320228-Orlando-nightclub-massacre-eyewitnesses-More-than-one-shooter-snipers-fired-at-police-someone-blocked-exits)
Some reported that Mateen was on the phone with police telling them that he had others helping him. One witness even said that Mateen appeared to be talking to someone he knew and describing how there were three others involved, one of them a woman.
It appears now that most of the shooting took place in the first few minutes after the first shot, at 2:02 a.m. Is it likely that someone not used to using an assault rifle could have fired hundreds of shots in a crowded club in such a short time, particularly with just as many people being killed as were injured? I don’t really know the answer to that. Is it believable that the shooter could have reloaded numerous times, and even made several phone calls, without anyone trying to jump him or grab him? I don’t know that either, and I can’t imagine how I would react in a real situation of this type.
https://www.facebook.com/mark.ronne#
Days after the Orlando shooting massacre, Florida’s Attorney General Pam Bondi is still waiting on a call from the president.
President Obama had not called Bondi or Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott following Sunday’s deadly shooting at a gay nightclub, which left 49 people dead and more than 50 wounded, Fox News reported.
There was “no contact” made yet by the White House, Bondi said, responding to a question about the level of communication with the president.
“He has had no contact with me nor do I believe he’s contacted our governor at all,” Bondi told Brian Kilmeade on “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday. She noted that they would be more than happy to meet with Obama if he asked, but so far have only been in contact with federal “boots on the ground,” like FBI investigators.
When asked if she was disappointed in the lack of communication, Bondi replied, “Of course we are.”
“This isn’t about politics right now. This is about Americans,” she said. “I believe he should have reached out to the governor of the state of Florida, and he hasn’t.”
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