Just as public outpourings of support increase in the wake of Saturday night’s deadly mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, so too does the amount of reported information about the suspect, Omar Mateen. The media’s acknowledgment of him will likely garner the same condemnation that recent instances like the San Bernardino killers and Kalamazoo, Michigan’s so-called “Uber shooter” have received. Some suggest that such coverage elevates the assailant’s celebrity status at the cost of the lives lost to his or her rampage. Perhaps there’s some truth to this, but as more about Mateen’s past makes its way out into the world, the more confusing his possible reasoning for killing 49 people and injuring more than 50 others becomes.
Consider this exclusive report from The Daily Beast, in which a drag queen and former high-school classmate of Mateen’s recalled never seeing any of the homophobia claimed by the suspect’s father in prior reports. Instead, Samuel King (whose drag performance name is unclear) knew the fellow mall worker and high-school classmate as a man who “always had a smile on his face”:
“That’s the thing that’s pinning me to the wall the most, that it was a gay nightclub,” King said. “Because he would come into the [the restaurant] and laugh with us.
“He might’ve even sat down at the bar and had a drink and laughed with the bartenders, knowing that they were lesbians,” King added.
King’s story first made waves on Facebook, where he wrote that Mateen “worked at GNC at the treasure coast mall when I was at Ruby Tuesday’s and he graduated from the same high school in 2004.” He called him a “jokester” and noted that he “didn’t have an issue with the LGBT community” back then. In fact, King suspects that Mateen may have even attended one of his drag shows, as the latter knew about the former’s performances and never expressed any issues with them:
King likely showed him, like the rest of the employees and regulars, photos in full costume from his performances.
“I can’t pinpoint a date that he went with us, but he probably gone there with us once,” he said.
However, just because King never saw any signs of Mateen’s potential dislike of the LGBT community or religious extremism doesn’t mean that reports suggesting either aren’t true. Already there is plenty of evidence indicating that Mateen had become a self-made radical — including a 911 call in which he pledged his allegiance to ISIS, said terrorist organization’s own attempt to claim responsibility for the shooting, and past interviews with the FBI in 2013 and 2014.
Add allegations of homophobia by Mateen’s ex-wife to the mix, and it’s easy to see why King’s contributions to the conversation have rendered an already confusing situation into an inescapably complicated puzzle for investigators to solve.
(Via The Daily Beast and Facebook)