Shocking facts are being uncovered in the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting in American history. Turns out that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen didn’t pick Club Pulse at random. Quite the opposite, in fact. He had personally patronized the club and interacted with its clientele heavily on over a dozen occasions.
Check out what MailOnline had to say:
Omar Mateen, the gunman who murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning, was a regular at the club, patrons have said.
Mateen, who was armed with an assault rifle and handgun, entered Pulse nightclub in Orlando and opened fire, killing and injuring dozens before a SWAT team knocked down a wall of the club and shot him. But that wasn’t the first time he’d been there, The Orlando Sentinel reported.
One regular at the club said he’d seen Mateen, whose father claimed he was very homophobic, at least a dozen times there before the massacre.
‘Sometimes he would go over in the corner and sit and drink by himself,’ Ty Smith, who also uses the name Aries, told the Sentinel Monday. ‘Other times he would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent,’ he added.
Remarks that Mateen drank heavily conflict with his apparently strict adherence to his Muslim faith, including regular worship at a mosque in his home town of Port St. Lucie – where he was quiet and kept to himself.
Smith said he’d seen Mateen at Pulse ‘at least a dozen times’, joining three others who said they’d seen the shooter at the club before. ‘We didn’t really talk to him a lot, but I remember him saying things about his dad at times,’ Smith said. ‘He told us he had a wife and child.’
Mateen’s father, Seddique Mir Mateen, denied that the attack had anything to do with religion, and said his son had become enraged after seeing two men kissing in Miami months before.