“Finally, around 2 a.m., Mateen fired the first shots in the Pulse nightclub,” a motion filed by the defense read. He hesitated, turned back toward Eve, then turned around again and headed back to Pulse. on June 12, the night of the attack, Mateen performed one final Google search for “downtown Orlando nightclubs” and began to drive to Pulse.
Eve Orlando, in a busy downtown nightclub district, is in an area with heavy police presence, Swift said.Īfter 1 a.m. Mateen then drove to Eve, where he stayed for six minutes before driving away. But it wasn’t until he was near Epcot that Mateen googled “downtown Orlando nightclubs,” which delivered Eve Orlando and Pulse as top results. Then, just after midnight, he googled “Disney World,” and his cellphone placed him near towers around Epcot, another Disney-owned theme park, according to The Orlando Sentinel.
On the night of June 11, 2016, Omar Mateen googled and visited Disney Springs, a popular Orlando outdoor shopping and recreation area. The case leaned heavily on forensic cellphone evidence and security camera footage. Doing so required undoing the prevailing narrative that the Pulse shooting was an attack on the LGBTQ community. So to win Salman’s acquittal, Swift and his team convinced jurors that Mateen had chosen Pulse at random. “The only way Noor Salman could know that Pulse nightclub was going to be attacked was if Omar Mateen knew it was going to be attacked,” Swift said. By the end, Salman had signed a confession saying she had helped Mateen case the nightclub and prepare for the attack. For 12½ hours, agents questioned her without an attorney present. Just hours after the shooting began, Salman was in an FBI interrogation room. Noor Salman, wife of Pulse gunman Omar Mateen, in a Facebook profile photo. Univision aired an interview with a disguised man named “Miguel” who called Mateen “100 percent” gay, but there were no electronic records of their alleged Grindr-facilitated rendezvous, and other news outlets cast doubt on his credibility. One, Ty Smith, said he “would go over in the corner and sit and drink by himself, and other times he would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent.” (Nothing in their sex life indicated that he was, she told Time.)įour regular Pulse customers told The Orlando Sentinel that Mateen sometimes visited Pulse.
His first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, suggested in an interview with Time magazine, with little evidence other than his penchant for bodybuilding and mirror-gazing, that Omar Mateen could have been gay. Which leaves another question: How could the Pulse attack be a hate crime against gay people if the perpetrator chose it randomly? In their closing statement, government prosecutors admitted that there was no evidence to suggest that Mateen knew that Pulse was a gay club.
FL GAY BAR SHOOTING TRIAL
"And hatred towards people because of sexual orientation, regardless of where it comes from, is a betrayal of what’s best in us.”Ī few days earlier, presidential candidate Donald Trump said at a rally, “A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub, not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens, because of their sexual orientation.”īut during the trial of Omar Mateen’s widow, Noor Salman, all forensic evidence suggested that up until the moment he turned into the Pulse parking lot, Mateen had been considering other venues, rejecting them because they were more heavily guarded. “This was an attack on the LGBT community,” the president said. Four days after the attack, on June 16, 2016, President Barack Obama visited survivors in Orlando and delivered a statement.