Omar Mateen, who pledged allegiance to ISIS in a call to 911 during his rampage, murdered 49 people including himself at Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando, Florida on Sunday.
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Smith told the Orlando Sentinel, “Sometimes he would go over in the corner and sit and drink by himself, and other times he would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent. Then I tried to approach him and he started shooting at us and then the police came and it was a continuous shooting between them and after that he went inside”, another witness added.
The Orlando Police Department on Monday revealed accused Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Seddique Mateen told law enforcement he was wearing a bomb vest during the massacre.
The owner of a Port St. Lucie gun shop where Omar Mateen purchased two of the guns used in the deadly mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub says he wishes he had not chosen his shop.
Police chief John Mina said that an off-duty officer who had been working at Pulse responded to shots fired around 2am on Sunday. “After ten months of investigation, we closed the preliminary investigation”, the FBI Director said.
“We knew there would be an imminent loss of life”, Mina said. “I’m still kind of in shock a little bit”, Orlando resident Elizabeth Cortes, 26, told ABC News. He told reporters he never suspected his son would do such a thing, noting, “If I did know of 1 percent that he’s committing such a crime, my son, I would arrest him myself”. King said that Mateen had seemed generally accepting of the fact that he and his friends were openly gay. Officials said they were still trying to pin down whom the gunman may have met during weeklong visits to Saudi Arabia in 2011 and 2012 – but believe he made the trips to perform umrah, a religious pilgrimage millions of Muslims make to holy city of Mecca during Ramadan.
Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told CBS This Morning why the attack may have been hard to prevent – “The FBI literally investigates things like that thousands and thousands and thousands of times, they simply found nothing to follow up on to open up a bigger investigation”. As it turned out, Mateen had no explosives with him. He says handgun purchases require a three-day waiting period and a background check, while long gun purchases require only the background check.
A three-hour standoff ensued, and in that time Mateen made contact with police dispatchers several times. The city of Orlando has released the first seven names of those killed in the attack.
Mateen bought both of the guns he used in the attack legally, approximately a week apart, roughly 10 days before the shooting.
Mateen had also worked security at the St. Lucie County courthouse, where attorney Steven Smith remembered him. “I’ve gone up to him and, like I said, I said “good morning” to him”.
“The dispatcher called him back and they spoke briefly”, FBI Director James Comey said in a statement.
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Comey added that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was confused about the attacker’s motives, since Mateen’s 911 call talked about allegiance to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), as well as the Tsarnaev brothers – perpetrators of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing – and Moner Abu-Salha, a Florida man who became a suicide bomber on behalf of Al-Nusra Front, an Al-Qaeda affiliate.
