In search of answers in Orlando
One year later, plenty of theories but few facts on Pulse gunman
A red dot on a map represented every time the terror group also known as ISIS took credit for shoving someone off a roof, or stoning someone to death, or shooting someone in the head while noting their sexual behavior. By June 2016, 41 red dots littered the maps of Iraq and Syria.
Then came the Pulse massacre on June 12, 2016, putting Florida on the map with 49 red dots, one for each victim. Not everyone killed at Pulse was gay, but ISIS ,which claimed responsibility for the attack, noted the victims were all in “a nightclub for homosexuals.”
There’s still no evidence that Pulse killer Omar Mateen intended to target gay people. A year after the massacre, the only confirmed motive is Mateen’s statements to 911 operators and hostage negotiators. He told them he pledged allegiance to ISIS and wanted people to know the pain that Syrians and Iraqis felt.
“At the end of the day, there are things we can learn from this, but we may not get a definitive answer that explains why the killer chose this target,” said Mary Ellen O’Toole, a former senior profiler with the FBI and an expert on mass shootings.
Multiple people have said over the past year they think that Mateen was a regular at the club or that he was gay — even though law enforcement officials and the FBI reportedly found no evidence to support those theories. Former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch originally called the rampage — the deadliest mass shooting in American history — a hate crime and a terrorist attack.
Jessica Stern, executive director of OutRight Action International, the group tracking gay killings, sees no conflict between those theories. Nor do criminal profilers and others interviewed about Mateen’s motive.
“There are domestic factors and international factors, and both are so important,” Stern said, referring to Mateen’s history, life experiences and ISIS. “For Omar Mateen, ISIS was simply the justification.”
Clues about the killer’s motive have come out in bond hearings for Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman, who is charged with obstructing the investigation and with aiding and abetting terrorism. She faces trial in Orlando next year.
According to prosecutors, Salman told investigators that her husband asked her, “What would make people more upset, an attack on downtown Disney or a club?”
The FBI, which is leading the investigation, will not comment further on the Orlando shooting while the Salman case is pending, a spokeswoman in the bureau’s Tampa office said.
People who knew Mateen reported, including to authorities, that he was violent and bigoted. Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, told reporters after the attack that his son was angered when he saw two gay men kissing in Miami.
Dan Gilroy, Mateen’s former co-worker at the G4S security firm, said he has no doubt about Mateen’s motive.
“I believe he was gay,” Gilroy said. “He didn’t want to be, or like it, or accept it, but he was.”
He said Mateen expressed so much anger that he sometimes said he would kill a lot of people someday, setting a record.
Gilroy claims he reported Mateen’s behavior to his managers. He alleges G4S didn’t react, and Gilroy quit. G4S confirmed Gilroy worked for the company but said it has no record of his complaint.
Gilroy said he also called Port St. Lucie police the day of the Pulse shooting, to tell them he had information about Mateen. But Gilroy said authorities never called him back.
The Port St. Lucie Police Department confirmed that Gilroy called. Asked why the department didn’t follow up on Gilroy’s call, a spokesman didn’t respond by press time.
A Pulse victim who survived the shooting, Patience Carter, may have provided a clue about how Mateen found Pulse. She said at a news conference that her friends were strangers to the Orlando club scene. They picked Pulse because it came up first when they did a Google search for clubs in Orlando, with a five-star rating.
Two criminal profilers who reviewed information about Mateen for the Orlando Sentinel said that his actions indicate he was on familiar ground at the Pulse nightclub, and that he probably had profound hatred of gay people and himself.
“The comfort level this offender showed, I would say he’s been to this club before,” said O’Toole, the former FBI senior profiler.
If Mateen was angry about Syria, he had a range of options for expressing that, she said.
“He may have been very upset about Syria, but in these cases, when you strip away the attempt by the killer to state some sort of cause or motive, you often find a much more simple reason,” O’Toole said.
Tom Davis, a retired profiler for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said he has seen violent killings of gay people before, and they are usually motivated by self-hatred.
But Robert Spencer, a speaker and author of a blog called Jihad Watch, said the idea that Mateen was motivated partly by self-hatred or repressed sexuality has been used to divert attention from the problem of Islamic extremism.
He warned that the world should be concerned about more attacks every year at Ramadan, the holy month for Muslims, when Mateen chose to attack.
“If Mateen was gay, which is completely hypothetical and bereft of evidence, he could possibly have been aware of sinning before Allah and knew that he could outweigh all his sins by one great act of jihad,” Spencer said. “In other words, if he was gay, this wouldn’t necessarily mean that his murders weren’t motivated by Islam’s doctrine of jihad.”
David Baker Hargrove, an Orlando psychologist who specializes in LGBT issues, said he believes sexual orientation may have been a factor in Mateen’s violence.
“Violence is not the norm. Normally they suffer in silence,” Baker Hargrove said adding that better mental health counseling could help prevent more such mass shooters.
Spencer rejected that: “No amount of gun control or health care would have stopped Mateen.”
Mateen’s threats of violence, and the fact that he made threats about having ties to terrorist organizations, were clear warning signs, O’Toole said. The FBI has previously confirmed that Mateen was investigated for making statements about terrorist ties.
“Not everyone who makes threats carries them out, but there was apparently a pattern here,” O’Toole said. “It’s amazing how many people don’t recognize warning signs.”
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