Pulse shooter’s widow acquitted
Salman didn’t help her husband kill 49 people in Orlando
ORLANDO, Fla. — Noor Salman is not guilty of helping her husband, Omar Mateen, carry out the mass shooting that claimed 49 lives at Pulse nightclub on June 12, 2016, a jury decided Friday.
The 12-member jury delivered its verdict after deliberating for about 12 hours over three days. Salman was also acquitted of obstruction of justice. Prosecutors accused her of lying to the FBI agents who investigated her husband’s mass murder, which he carried out in support of a foreign terror group, the Islamic State.
Had she been convicted, Salman, 31, would have faced up to life in prison.
Salman was crying after the verdict was read. She looked back at her family before leaving the courtroom through a side door, escorted by a U.S. marshal. Her cousin and two uncles began sobbing and hugging as soon as a clerk read the words “not guilty.”
“Happy Friday. It’s Good Friday,” Salman’s uncle, Al Salman, said outside the courthouse later.
He thanked his niece’s attorneys, the judge and the jury.
“Now, we’re looking forward to taking my niece and hiring a therapist for her,” he said. “I don’t know how she’s going to make up for the last two years. ... I said, day one, that she’s innocent and I would stand here in front of you when the jury comes with the verdict to tell you, ‘I told you so.’”
“Now,” he said, “I came here to tell you: ‘I told you so.’”
Added Susan Adieh, Salman’s cousin: “We knew from day one she was innocent, and thank God it came out.”
Prosecutors in the case spoke only briefly after the verdict and didn’t take questions. “While we’re disappointed in the jury’s verdict, we respect their verdict and we appreciate all of their hard work and thank them for their service in this case,” prosecutor Sara Sweeney said.
Pulse owner Barbara Poma, who was present for the verdict, left silently with a group of family members of Pulse victims after it was read. Some held hands as they left the courthouse. Speaking to reporters, defense attorney Fritz Scheller called the victims’ families “extraordinary people” and thanked them for their decorum and dignity.
“They’ve gone through a lot,” he said.
Asked where he thought the government lost the case, Scheller said it was “when they started pushing this theory that Noor Salman is a cold, callous, calculating woman who only cares about herself and maybe her son.” Added fellow defense lawyer Charles Swift: “The government didn’t deliver on its promises.”
The prosecution sought to prove Salman helped Mateen prepare for the attack, joining him as he scouted possible targets and bought guns and ammunition. They also said Salman concocted a cover story to tell Mateen’s mother after he left their Fort Pierce apartment to commit the attacks.
Salman’s defense, however, said there was no reason for Mateen to involve his wife in his plot — and no proof he had done so.
“Why would Omar Mateen confide in Noor, a woman he clearly had no respect for?” defense attorney Linda Moreno said during her closing arguments. “She was not his peer, she was not his partner, and she was not his confidant.”
Central to the case were statements Salman made to Special Agent Ricardo Enriquez at an FBI office in the hours after the attack. The jury never heard those statements directly, as the agent didn’t record them. Instead, he transcribed her words — at her request, he said, because she was too nervous.
Enriquez testified about the moment he said he realized Salman was involved in her husband’s plot. After transcribing a statement from her, he asked her to sign the document and write that she had been treated fairly. She appended an apology: “I am sorry for what happened,” she wrote. “I wish I’d go back and tell his family and the police what he was going to do.”
“I said, ‘You know, Noor, I realize that you knew what was going on. You knew,’” Enriquez testified.
She denied it, so he asked her to re-read the statement.
“She began to cry, and said, ‘I knew,’” Enriquez said.
Salman would give two more statements to Enriquez, ultimately confessing she knew her husband was preparing for an attack. She also described a chilling scene: sitting alongside him as he drove around Pulse for 20 minutes during a family trip on June 8, 2016, and talked about attacking the club. But there was a problem. According to experts for both sides, the trip didn’t occur as described in Enriquez’s written statements.
FBI Special Agent Richard Fennern testified that most of the couple’s time that day was accounted for with receipts and cell phone records. They visited the Florida Mall, at a falafel restaurant and at a Kissimmee mosque, Fennern said, but Salman’s phone “had never been near the Pulse nightclub.”
In the government’s closing argument, Sweeney argued other elements of Salman’s confession were corroborated, such as her accounts of a trip to City Place in Palm Beach, a visit to Disney Springs and details of her husband’s extravagant spending before the attack.
“The fact that these things are ultimately corroborated shows you that the defendant did not give a false confession,” Sweeney said.
Sweeney said Mateen’s initial plan was to attack Disney Springs. He had bought a doll and a baby stroller, in which he planned to smuggle his rifle into the attraction, she said. But he was spooked by the police presence there and switched plans, ultimately choosing to strike at Pulse.
It didn’t matter if Salman knew her husband’s target, Sweeney said.
“She does not have to be his equal in the attack, and in fact she is not,” the prosecutor said.
But the defense argued to the contrary: that “if he didn’t know, she couldn’t know,” as Swift put it in his closing argument.