Pulse motive a mystery

Investigators offer more theories than answers

Why? A year after 49 people were gunned down at an Orlando nightclub, Omar Mateen’s motive remains a mystery. Why a gay club? Why during Latin night? And why a place two hours from his home? ISIS claimed responsibility and mentioned the gay clientele, but there’s no evidence that had a role in Mateen’s rationale.

For two years before the shooting at Pulse nightclub, a nonprofit group tracked ISIS-inspired killings of gay people across the globe.

A red dot on a map represented every time the Islamic State took credit for shoving someone off a roof, or stoning them to death, or shooting them in the head while noting their sexual behavior. By June 2016, 41 red dots in Iraq and Syria littered the map.

Then came the Pulse massacre on June 12, putting Florida on the map with 49 red dots. Not everyone killed at Pulse was gay, but ISIS, which claimed responsibility for the attack, noted the victims were all in “a nightclub for homosexuals.”

But there’s still no evidence that the Pulse killer intended to target gay people. A year after the massacre, the only confirmed motive is the shooter’s statements to 911 operators and hostage negotiators. He told them he pledged allegiance to ISIS and wanted people to know the pain that Syrians and Iraqis felt.

“At the end of the day, there are things we can learn from this, but we may not get

a definitive answer that explains why the killer chose this target,” said Mary Ellen O’Toole, a former senior profiler with the FBI and an expert on mass shootings.

Multiple people have said over the past year they think Omar Mateen was a regular at the club or that he was gay himself — even though U.S. law enforcement officials and the FBI reportedly found no evidence to support those theories. Former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch originally called the shooting a hate crime and a terrorist attack.

Jessica Stern, executive director of OutRight Action International, the group tracking gay killings, sees no conflict between those ideas, and neither do criminal profilers and others interviewed about Mateen’s motive.

“There are domestic factors and international facgroup, and both are so important,” Stern said, referring to Mateen’s history, life experiences and ISIS. “For Omar Mateen, ISIS was simply the justification.”

Clues about the killer’s motive have come out in bond hearings for Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman, who is charged with obstructing the investigation and with aiding and abetting terrorism. She faces trial in Orlando next year.

According to prosecutors, Salman told investigators that her husband asked her, “What would make people more upset, an attack on downtown Disney or a club?”

Mateen didn’t say “gay club,” according to court records. He also didn’t mention gay people in phone calls during the attack. Authorities said Salman told them Mateen was gauging whether it would be better to attack at Pulse, Disney Springs or City Place, an entertainment and shopping district in West Palm Beach. The closer target would have been City Place, about 65 miles from his Fort Pierce home. The Orlando locations were 120 miles away.

People who knew Mateen reported, sometimes to authorities, that he was violent and bigoted. Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, told reporters after the attack that his son was angered when seeing two gay men kissing in Miami.

Dan Gilroy, Mateen’s former coworker at G4S security firm, said he has no doubt about Mateen’s motive.

“I believe he was gay,” Gilroy said. “He didn’t want to be, or like it, or accept it, but he was.”

He said Mateen worked in the same guard shack and often came in early for the next shift, chatting a lot.

But the chat got weird, according to Gilroy: “When I told him to buzz off and stop talking to me, he totally acted like a jilted lover would act. Went from hot to cold. Said he’s sorry. Then said ‘I’m gonna get you.’ ”

He said Mateen expressed so much anger that he sometimes said he would kill a lot of people someday, setting a record.

Gilroy says he reported Mateen’s behavior to his managers. According to him, G4S didn’t react, and Gilroy quit. G4S confirmed Gilroy worked for the company but said it has no record of his complaint.

Gilroy said he also called Port St. Lucie police the day of the Pulse shooting, to tell them he had information about Mateen. But Gilroy said authorities never called him back or followed up.

Port St. Lucie Police Department confirmed that Gilroy called. Asked why the department didn’t follow up on Gilroy’s call, a spokesman for the department didn’t respond by press time.

A Pulse victim who survived the shooting, Patience Carter, may have given a clue about how Mateen found Pulse. She told reporters at a news confertors, ence that her friends were strangers to the Orlando club scene. They picked Pulse because it came up first when they did a Google search for clubs in Orlando, with a five-star rating.

“The comfort level this offender showed, I would say he’s been to this club before,” said O’Toole, the former FBI senior profiler.

If Mateen was angry about Syria, he had a range of options for expressing that, she said.

“He may have been very upset about Syria, but in these cases, when you strip away the attempt by the killer to state some sort of cause or motive, you often find a much more simple reason,” O’Toole said.

Tom Davis, a retired profiler for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said he has seen violent killings of gay people before, and they are usually motivated by self-hatred.

Davis said killers like Mateen “will join any group, including religious, and make allegiance to that and claim some of their values.”

But Robert Spencer, a speaker and author of a blog called Jihad Watch, said the idea that Mateen was motivated partly by self-hatred or repressed sexuality has been used to divert attention from the problem of Islamic extremism.

He warned that the world should be concerned about more attacks every year at Ramadan, the holy month for Muslims, when Mateen chose to attack.

“If Mateen was gay, which is completely hypothetical and bereft of evidence, he could possibly have been aware of sinning before Allah and knew that he could outweigh all his sins by one great act of jihad,” Spencer said. “In other words, if he was gay, this wouldn’t necessarily mean that his murders weren’t motivated by Islam’s doctrine of jihad.”