Club killings: America’s heartache.
Heartbreaking final messages reveal the terror in an Orlando gay club as a gunman mowed down revellers and took hostages
AT 2.06 AM her cellphone buzzed. Mina Justice sat up in bed and blearily rubbed her eyes. “Mommy, I love you,” the message read. “In the club they shooting.” The text message was from her 30-year-old son, Eddie, and it made her blood run cold. She tried phoning him but got no reply. Then came more texts. Eddie explained that amid the mayhem unfolding in Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, he and other partygoers had retreated to a women’s bathroom to take cover – but to no avail.
“He’s coming. I’m gonna die,” wrote Eddie, an accountant.
Then a few moments later, “He has us and he’s fixin’ to kill us.”
Then nothing. Hours later Mina received the news she’d been dreading: Eddie was dead. He was among the 50 killed and the scores left injured after a lone gunman went on a hate-fuelled rampage.
Just before 2 am Omar Mateen (29) parked his van outside the club and made a call to an emergency hotline in which he pledged allegiance to radical terrorist group Isis.
Armed with an AR-15-type assault weapon, a handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, he caught the eye of a police officer who tried to stop him. After a brief gun battle he went into the club where 320 revellers were enjoying a Latin American-themed event.
A hostage situation unfolded. Three hours later, after negotiations had failed, a SWAT team of 100 officers stormed the building, shooting and killing Mateen and ending his reign of terror.
Now Americans are struggling to make sense of the massacre, which ranks as the country’s deadliest mass shooting ever and the worst terrorist attack since 9/11.
Isis claimed Mateen as one of its own and US president Barack Obama branded the attack “an act of terror and hate”. It was the 14th time during his tenure that he’d had to address the nation in the aftermath of a mass shooting and his sixth within the past year alone.
How was it possible this was happening again? Obama shared his theory: “This massacre is a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school or in a house of worship or a movie theatre or in a nightclub.”
He added, “We have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. To actively do nothing is a decision as well.”
But not everyone is buying it. Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, says the problem isn’t guns but rather “radical Islamic terrorism”.
MATEEN had been on the radar of American authorities for several years. Born in New York to Afghani immigrants and raised in the state of Florida, he worked as a security guard after graduating from college with a degree in criminal justice.
In 2013 he was interrogated by the FBI after bragging to colleagues about his “terrorist ties”.
“Ultimately we were unable to verify
the substance of his comments and the investigation was closed,” says Ron Hopper, head of the FBI in Orlando.
In 2014 he was questioned again over suspected links to Al Qaeda but once again there was insufficient evidence.
Mateen’s first wife, Sitora Yusufiy (27), originally from Uzbekistan, lived with him in constant terror. She says Mateen was “bipolar, abusive, unstable and very short-tempered”.
They married in 2009 after meeting online but were together for only four months. It seems Mateen later married Noor Zahi Salman (30), with whom he had a son, now three years old, but it’s unclear if they were still together.
Daniel Gilroy, one of Mateen’s former colleagues, has revealed he felt so uncomfortable working with him that he requested a transfer.
“He was scary in a concerning way,” Daniel recalls. “And it wasn’t at times. It was all the time. He had anger-management issues . . . The things that would set him off were always women, race or religion. Those were his button-pushers.”
Mateen’s father, Seddique, has said his son was also homophobic.
“We were in downtown Miami . . . he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry,” recalls Seddique, who’s condemned the attack.
Investigators are trying to figure out whether his attack on the gay club was motivated by his intense homophobia, religious extremism, terrorist connections or a mix of all three.
But right now ordinary Americans want to know how this man, who clearly had issues, managed to buy guns just days before carrying out his deadly plan.
Predictably the attack sparked heated debate about the issue of gun control in a country where it’s almost as easy to buy a firearm as it is to buy a loaf of bread; where even citizens who are viewed as enough of a threat to be on the No Fly List – which prohibits them from flying anywhere within or out of America – are still able to buy weapons in terms of the country’s lenient laws. Statistics show America is so gun mad there’s a firearm for every man, woman and child.
Obama has repeatedly called for tighter gun controls but his pleas have fallen on deaf ears. America’s Pew Research Centre has recorded an overall increase in support for gun “rights”, rather than controls, over the past 20 years.
In the US the right to keep and bear arms is so sacrosanct it’s even enshrined in the constitution. Although federal law requires licensed firearms dealers to perform background checks, private sellers operating online or at gun fairs remain largely unregulated. It’s estimated that 40 percent of all firearms are sold “with no questions asked”.
In 2012, after a spate of shootings, a gun-violence task force was created which led to proposed reforms on background checks, a ban on assault weapons and limits on ammunition sales. But all these measures were ultimately rejected when they went before the Republican Party-dominated senate.
The party’s manifesto states it “upholds the right of individuals to keep and bear arms [as part of] the law-abiding citizen’s God-given right of self-defence”. It’s now seeking ways to allow gun owners with state permits to take their weapons anywhere in the US.
So for all his fighting talk on the issue of guns, it seems Obama is fighting a losing battle.