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| Images Omar Mateen submitted to a Florida agency for his work as a security guard. Top, from left, in 2007 and 2009, and bottom, 2011 and 2013.via Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services |
WASHINGTON POST
After a lifetime of angst and embarrassment, Omar Mateen was on the verge of realizing a longtime dream in the spring of 2007.
He was about to graduate from a Florida training academy that would put him on a path to being a police officer. He had left behind his youth as a pudgy, often-bullied kid to become a bulked-up bodybuilder. He was learning how to shoot a gun. Now it was all about to fall apart.
At a class barbecue, Mateen told a fellow cadet he was “allergic” to pork, and he got teased about it. Mateen blew up, recalled several cadets who were present, and said he couldn’t eat anything off the grill.
“I asked him if he was Muslim and he denied it,” Roy Wolf said. “I said, ‘It doesn’t matter to me if you are.’ . . . He got mad, really angry.”
A short while later — just a week after the Virginia Tech shooting that left 32 victims dead — Mateen asked a classmate whether he would report him if he brought a gun to campus, documents show. The next thing students knew, Mateen had been kicked out of the academy for a pattern of sleeping in class, plus the gun threat, which officials described in documents as “at best extremely disturbing.”
Mateen was never charged, and so the incident became one more anecdote in a life punctuated by many such moments, outbursts when his insecurities and inner conflict erupted into rage — a pattern culminating Sunday at a gay nightclub in Orlando in the worst shooting in U.S. history.
Mateen appeared conflicted about his religion and his sexuality, according to dozens of interviews with those who knew him. He married twice, each time to a woman he had met online, even though he also seemed drawn to gay life and culture.
Often, he was able to mask his internal turmoil well enough that some friends and neighbors are now stunned to learn that the person they knew became a killer.
But over the years, Mateen’s inner conflict seemed to explode again and again — not only at the training academy but also toward classmates, toward co-workers, toward his first wife and finally toward the 49 strangers he left massacred on the bloody floor of the Pulse nightclub.
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NY TIMES
The brother of the bride arrived late for her reception. But soon enough he was mingling at the lakeside pavilion in West Palm Beach, where a diverse gathering of guests dined on chicken tikka masala and goat biryani while admiring the view of the Intracoastal Waterway just beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Then came the moment to join in a traditional Afghan dance called the attan, in which dancers form a circle and are led through a series of synchronized turns and moves. If well executed, the attan can create an almost trancelike sense of oneness.
But here was the bride’s brother — stocky, bespectacled Omar Mateen — dancing in the group and yet dancing apart. Clumsy, out of sync, his head mostly down, the man dressed in black was following his own rhythm.
Four months after this celebration of life in February, the awkward man in black caused wholesale death. Chuckling and declaring allegiance to the Islamic State, he opened fire at a gay and Latino nightclub here, leaving 49 people dead and wounding 53 others before he was killed by the police to end a protracted standoff.
But his professed embrace of the Islamic State and its call for disaffected Muslims to attack the West seem to have come suddenly, as if something snapped. And while some reports have suggested that he was gay, federal officials say they have found no evidence in his effects or online presence to back them up.
Instead, the recollections of those who knew or encountered him conjure a man who could be charming, even laid-back, yet who also seemed forever aggrieved, forever not at peace, forever out of step. A chubby kid making inappropriate jokes about 9/11 in the fresh wake of that catastrophe. A leering misogynist whose pursuits could rattle women. An off-putting employee who spoke casually of killing those who offended him. The security guard and wannabe cop whose scattershot anger made others feel unsafe.
“He was just agitated about everything,” Daniel Gilroy, a former co-worker in the security business, recalled. “Always shaken. Always agitated. Always mad.”
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