Updates to our Terms of Use

We are updating our Terms of Use. Please carefully review the updated Terms before proceeding to our website.

Friday, April 19, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

New Reports on Orlando Shooter’s Red Flags

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. (CN) - Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen's unsettling behavior while attending a prison-guard training school stirred fear of a workplace shooting, Department of Corrections records indicate.

Within two weeks of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, a warden at Martin Correctional Institution took action to expel Mateen from the training academy in response to his comments about bringing a gun to school, newly released documents show.

"In light of recent tragic events at Virginia Tech," Mateen's comments were "at best extremely disturbing," the warden wrote in a letter, recommending Mateen's probationary removal from Florida Corrections Academy at Indian River State College.

The letter was released to the public Friday evening by the Department of Corrections. It's one of the latest items in an ever-expanding list of purported signs that Mateen had been contemplating an act of violence long before his June 12 rampage at the Pulse gay club in Orlando.

According to the man who filed the initial grievance at the academy, Mateen had approached him laughing, and asked him if he'd tell anybody if Mateen were to take a gun to school. Mateen allegedly made the comments two days before the Virginia Tech mass shooting in April 2007.

The comments along with more mundane misbehavior (sleeping in class and leaving unannounced) precipitated Mateen's involuntary dismissal from the academy, the department records indicate.

"[Mateen] did not complete his academic program and was not certified as a correctional officer," the Department of Corrections said.

Shortly after his dismissal, Mateen lined up a job with G4S, a Jupiter, Fla.-based security company, where his alleged pattern of alarming outbursts and ideation of violent acts continued.

While working at the St. Lucie County courthouse for the security firm, he allegedly boasted of family ties to Al-Qaeda, and claimed he was hoping police would raid his home so he could die as a martyr.

According to the St. Lucie Sheriff's Office, he was reported to the FBI, and the courthouse supervisor asked G4S to transfer him elsewhere.

The FBI repeatedly investigated Mateen but took no punitive action, leaving him with a clean background-check record and the ability to legally wield firearms.

In the aftermath of the Orlando shooting, a former coworker at G4S, Daniel Gilroy, claimed Mateen was "unhinged."

Gilroy told Florida Today that Mateen regularly made bigoted remarks and "talked of killing people."

"I quit because everything he said was toxic," Gilroy reportedly said.

Mateen was employed with G4S up until he traveled to Orlando to carry out his massacre at the nightclub.

Forty-nine people died in the attack, and more than 50 were injured.

Mateen was killed in a shootout with police.

The attack was the most fatal mass shooting in the United States since Virginia Tech, and was deemed the deadliest single-shooter rampage in U.S. history.

Categories / Uncategorized

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Loading...