A look at Mateen’s troubled life, based on interviews with officials and people who knew him, as well as documents, reveals that on at least a dozen occasions, beginning when he was in grade school, he gave clues in a public setting that he was capable of mayhem.
At age 14, he said he could shoot an AK-47 and mimicked an airplane flying into the World Trade Center. At 26, he bragged to courthouse co-workers of terrorist ties. Weeks ago, at 29, Mateen sought to buy heavy-duty body armor and bulk ammunition…
After each disturbing eruption of anger, Mateen always danced just out of reach of those who could have stopped him. He hopped from school to school, job to job. Paper records were drawn up, notice was taken but little seemed to follow him…
“He was a mean, troubled child. Scary,” recalled Billie Miller, a grade-school classmate. In one former student’s copy of a Mariposa Elementary School yearbook from 1996-1997, the young Mateen’s smiling picture is circled in green, and the word “trouble-maker” is scribbled in child’s handwriting, with an arrow pointing to him…
At a barbecue in the spring of 2007, Mateen erupted when his hamburger touched a piece of pork, something he considered a religious affront. He told the class he ought to kill all of them, recalled Susanne Coburn Laforest, 61, who attended the barbecue as a trainee. Mateen told his classmates not to laugh at him because this was serious and “was going to come back and shoot us,” she said.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member