Killer’s sick joke revealed
The man who killed 49 people and wounded 53 at an LGBT nightclub in Florida last Sunday was dismissed from the state department of corrections in 2007 after joking about bringing a gun to a training class, according to records just released.
The Guardian can also report that G4S, the security company that employed Mateen just months after his dismissal, did not carry out a check on his employment record at the department, which could have raised further red flags about his state of mind.
Omar Mateen began his employment with the Florida department of corrections on October 27, 2006 and was fired six months later.
He had approached a fellow recruit, asking: ‘‘If I bring a gun to school would [you] tell anybody?’’
‘‘I looked at him and turned away,’’ the recruit wrote in a memo dated April 23, 2007. This was one week after a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech.
As a result, the warden of the institution where Mateen was employed recommended his dismissal.
‘‘In light of recent tragic events at Virginia Tech, officer Mateen’s inquiry about bringing a weapon to class is at best extremely disturbing,’’ the warden, PH Skipper, said.
Within months of his dismissal, Mateen passed a background check to begin work for G4S.
Mateen had told G4S he lost his corrections job for taking ‘‘two days off due to a fever’’. This story appears not to have been verified by the company.
But the revelations are likely to lead to more questions over the vetting he was subjected to before he was employed. Mateen was psychologically evaluated only at the start of his nine-year employment and was not subjected to further screening, even after the company became aware he had been interviewed by the FBI.
The agency investigated Mateen in 2013 and 2014 but closed its inquiries after it was unable to substantiate any legitimate security threat.
Mateen first came under scrutiny after telling co-workers he knew the brothers behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The FBI determined he invented the connection.