Omar Mateen

On March 30, 2018, an Orlando jury found her not guilty as the prosecution had not met its burden of providing evidentiary proof. According to the jury foreman, the jury felt she had vague foreknowledge of her husband's intentions. The FBI agent's interrogation went untaped, meaning the jurors did not get to see or hear definitive evidence of her complicity, if there was any. She had been held in jail awaiting trial since her arrest in California five months after the massacre.

Mateen took hostages after police arrived and engaged in a gunfight with him. At approximately 5:00 a.m., police shot and killed Mateen, ending the shooting. A total of 49 people were left dead along with Mateen, and 53 others were injured. Mateen was reported to have fired at least 110 rounds during the entire event. The attack was the deadliest known incident of violence against LGBT people in U.S. history and the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in the United States until it was surpassed by the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas.

On September 10, 2016, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services fined G4S $151,400 for providing inaccurate psychological testing information after it found the psychologist whose opinion was necessary to permit Mateen to carry a weapon was not practicing as a screener. Between 2006 and 2016, 1,514 forms were submitted erroneously listing Nudelman's name. Mateen's form was among those investigated. He had taken the MMPI-2 and Dr. Syed Shafeeq Rahman, a family physician who had close ties with Mateen's family, gave him a medical clearance. Rahman was also the imam of the Fort Pierce mosque to which the family belonged and said that Mateen had become progressively more "reclusive," and did not speak to other congregants before or after services. G4S admitted Mateen's form had a "clerical error", and clarified that he had instead been cleared by Rahman, who was from the same firm that bought the wrongly named doctor's practice. Rahman had not interviewed Mateen, but evaluated the results of a standard test used in the screening he undertook before being hired. Nonetheless, G4S removed Mateen from his job post at a courthouse because of threats he made towards coworkers, including one threat where he claimed he would have al-Qaeda kill a deputy's family. Mateen had claimed that his coworkers and courthouse deputies were making racist comments towards him. Despite this, G4S "kept Mateen as an employee" but moved him "to a kiosk at a gated community in Palm Beach County." They never informed the community or its property management company about why he was transferred there.

Officials briefed on the investigation also stated that Mateen went to an unspecified Walt Disney World theme park with his wife. He visited both Disney Springs, where security is less strict than at Disney theme parks, and Pulse between June 1 and 6 during the Gay Days 2016 celebrations at Disney World and in the Orlando area.

On June 14, 2016, NBC News reported that Noor Salman told the FBI she "drove him once to the gay nightclub, Pulse, because he wanted to scope it out," The FBI was almost immediately aware that this was not true, due to its review of cell phone location records from the day in question. Omar Mateen had searched for Orlando nightclub locations in the evening before the attack.

At approximately 2:00 a.m. on June 12, 2016, Mateen entered the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and began shooting. At 2:22 a.m., he made a 9-1-1 call in which he pledged allegiance to ISIL; referenced Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers; and mentioned Moner Mohammad Abu Salha, an acquaintance of his who died in a suicide bombing in Syria for the Al-Nusra Front in 2014. According to FBI officials, Mateen made two other 9-1-1 calls during the shooting. He also called News 13 of Orlando and identified himself as the nightclub shooter; The Washington Post reported that "he had carried out the Pulse attack for the Islamic State."

Mateen's father, Mir Seddique Mateen, who hosted a TV show called Durand Jirga Show on satellite television network Payam-e-Afghan in 2015 in which he represented himself as a candidate for the President of Afghanistan, and who has expressed gratitude towards the Taliban, said of his son's actions, "This had nothing to do with religion." He was quoted as saying that he had seen his son get angry after witnessing a gay couple kiss in front of his family at the Bayside Marketplace in Miami months before the attack, which he suggested might have been a motivating factor.

G4S said two screenings of Mateen—one conducted upon hiring and the other in 2013—had raised no red flags. Under Florida state law, for him to work as an armed guard the company was required either to make a full psychiatric evaluation of Mateen, or to administer a "validated written psychological test". The test administered was the updated Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2), a test used for job screenings and court cases requiring those subjected to it to agree or disagree with statements such as "My soul sometimes leaves my body" and "Once in a while I think of things too bad to talk about." Carol Nudelman, the psychologist listed on the character certification submitted by G4S to the state, said she stopped working for the company in 2005. After the shooting, Nudelman, who according to the records of the security company G4S, was said to have evaluated and cleared Mateen for his firearms license in 2007, denied ever meeting him or having lived in Florida at the time, and said she had stopped her practice in Florida in January 2006. G4S said Mateen was not actually interviewed by a psychologist, but rather, a psychologist evaluated the results of a standard test used in job screenings and his test was evaluated by the firm that bought Nudelman's practice, Headquarters for Psychological Evaluation.

Before the shooting, he had been investigated for connections to terrorism by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2013 and 2014. During that period, he was placed on the Terrorist Screening Database, but was subsequently removed. In a call to 9-1-1 during the shooting, Mateen identified himself as "Mujahideen", "Islamic Soldier", and "Soldier of God"; and pledged his allegiance multiple times to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who at the time was the leader of the militant jihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. He said the shooting was "triggered" by an airstrike in Iraq that killed Abu Wahib, an ISIL commander, six weeks before.

At a young age, Mateen displayed a preoccupation with violence, the Associated Press and The Washington Post reported. For his elementary and middle school education, he attended classes in St. Lucie County, Florida. While at Mariposa Elementary School, a third grade teacher wrote that Mateen was "very active ... constantly moving, verbally abusive, rude, aggressive ... much talk about violence & sex ... hands all over the place – on other children, in his mouth". In the seventh grade, Mateen was moved to a separate class with the purpose of avoiding "conflicts with other students" and suffered from poor scholarly performance due to "many instances of behavioral problems".

The FBI investigated Mateen in May 2013 after he made "inflammatory" remarks while working as a security guard. Mateen had told his coworkers that his family was linked to al-Qaeda and that he had joined Hezbollah, both rivals of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and of one another. Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIL during his 2016 shooting. FBI Director James Comey commented on the contradictions within Mateen's statements. The FBI interviewed Mateen twice after opening an investigation; in these interviews, Mateen admitted to making the statements but "explained that he said them in anger because his co-workers were teasing him." After 10 months, the investigation was closed and Mateen determined not to be a threat. Mateen had been placed on a terrorist watch list while the investigation was under way, but he was removed from it afterwards. Mateen came to the FBI's attention again in July 2014, when he was linked to Moner Mohammad Abu Salha, an American who had traveled to Syria and committed a suicide bombing in late May 2014. The two had been acquainted and "attended the same mosque." The investigation continued, but focused on Abu Salha rather than Mateen, law-enforcement officials told The Wall Street Journal.

Mateen visited Saudi Arabia for an eight-day trip in March 2011 and a ten-day trip in March 2012. The latter was organized by the Islamic Center at New York University. It included twelve New York City police officers and groups from Columbia and Yale and visited Mecca and Medina. Around these times, he went to the United Arab Emirates. FBI Director James Comey said Saudi officials helped investigate Mateen's trips. In June 2016, the House Intelligence Committee said that U.S. investigators "are searching for details about the Saudi Arabia trips."

In 2011, Mateen met his second wife, Noor Zahi Salman, on an online dating site, and the two married shortly afterward in Hercules, California, on September 29, 2011. Before that, she was married to a Palestinian, Ahmed Abu-Rahma from June 8, 2005, to February 26, 2010, in an arranged marriage that was organized in Ramallah of the Palestinian territories. Salman was born on May 26, 1986 in San Pablo, California, as the eldest of four daughters to Muslim Palestinian Arab immigrants; Bassam Abdallah Salman (d. 2015) and Ekbal Zahi, a grocery store owner. Her family emigrated to California from Ramallah in the 1970s. She grew up in Rodeo, California. She graduated from John Swett High School in 2004 and attended a business college in nearby Concord, California. She moved into Mateen's Fort Pierce home in November 2012. By September 2013, they were living in a house in Port St. Lucie with Mateen's father and another relative. She reportedly left Mateen and joined relatives in Rodeo, California, by December 2015. At the time of his death, Mateen had a three-year-old son with his second wife.

A former coworker who worked with Mateen in a gated community in western Port St. Lucie described him as "unhinged and unstable". He also said that he frequently made homophobic, racist, and sexist comments, and talked about killing people. The coworker stated he complained to G4S about Mateen "several times"; another co-worker told The New York Times Mateen made people wait at the gate for a number of reasons, including "if it was time for him to do his prayers." A resident who had lived at the community since 2011 described Mateen as "very polite" and "a very nice, positive person"; however, another customer said Mateen "acted like a straight-up predator."

In 2010, Mateen, while working for G4S, was interviewed for and appears in The Big Fix, the 2012 documentary about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Mateen said of those working on the cleanup:

In April 2009, Mateen married his first wife, Sitora Alisherzoda Yusufiy, an Uzbekistan-born woman whom he met in 2008 through Myspace, a social networking site. They separated after four months and divorced in July 2011.

In October 2006, Mateen began working as a recruit for the Florida Department of Corrections, being assigned to the Martin Correctional Institution. In a letter explaining his juvenile record as part of his successful application, Mateen explained the incident of when he was arrested at school when he was fourteen. He also wrote that he had experimented with marijuana as a young teenager. Following the Virginia Tech shooting in April 2007, Mateen suggested in a corrections officer training class that he would bring a gun to class. P.H. Skipper, who was the warden at the institution, wrote that "in light of the tragic events at Virginia Tech officer Mateen's inquiry about bringing a weapon to class is at best extremely disturbing." Days later on April 27, 2007, Mateen "was involuntarily dismissed" from the program and never became a certified corrections officer.

Mateen then worked for British-based security firm G4S Secure Solutions in Jupiter, Florida, from September 2007 until his death.

Mateen attended Indian River State College's Criminal Justice Training program and in a questionnaire, he admitted to committing or being involved in a crime that went undetected, but did not provide specific details. He went on to earn an associate of science degree in criminal justice technology from the college in 2006. He worked in a number of local stores and restaurants while attending school.

In 2006, Mateen filed a petition for a name change, adding Mateen as his surname to match that of his parents.

Several people who knew Mateen have speculated that he might have been gay or bisexual. A male friend of his from 2006, when the two were in police academy together, said that Mateen went to gay clubs with him and that Mateen once expressed an interest in dating him. Club-goers also recalled Mateen dancing with another man. One classmate, who asked not to be identified by name, said Mateen asked him if he was gay. The FBI has investigated many of these claims but has not found reasonable evidence to establish Mateen's sexual orientation.

A retired dean of Martin County High School, Dan Alley, said that they "tried to counsel him and show him the error of his ways, but it never had the effect that we were hoping for," and that his father "would not back up the school, and he would always take his son's side". Mateen was later sent to St. Lucie West Centennial High School after getting into a fight with a student. By the time Mateen had returned and graduated from Martin County's Stuart Adult Vocational School in 2003, he had been suspended for 48 days for being involved in fights and injuring other students.

Following the nightclub attack, Mateen's ex-wife told media outlets that during their marriage, Mateen was mentally unstable, and would beat her and keep her completely separated from her family. She also said that he was bipolar, though he had never been given that diagnosis, and had a history of using steroids. Mateen's second wife also said that Mateen became physically and verbally abusive towards her six months into their marriage, though she noted him being kinder in the weeks leading up to the shooting. A former high school student told the Washington Post that he witnessed 14-year-old Mateen, on the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks, being physically assaulted by his father, Mir Seddique Mateen, in front of other students.

Mateen began his secondary education at Martin County High School in 2000, and at the age of 14 was expelled after being in a fight in math class, where he was briefly arrested without being handcuffed and charged with battery and disrupting school, though the charges were later dropped. While a sophomore attending Spectrum, an alternative high school for students with behavioral issues, classmates told The Washington Post that Mateen cheered in support of the hijackers during the September 11 attacks and that he stated that Osama bin Laden was his uncle who taught him how to shoot AK-47s, all of this before knowing that bin Laden was the mastermind of the attacks. After his outburst, Mateen's father arrived at the school to pick him up and slapped him in the face, with Mateen later being suspended for five days after the incident. Soon after the September 11 attacks, "he shocked other students on his school bus by imitating an exploding plane", reported The New York Times.

A classmate at Mariposa said that Mateen was a bully, disrespectful to girls and acted like he was better than his classmates. Another classmate reported that Mateen was bullied at school because of his weight and his Afghan heritage. His parents were described as "dismissive" of his poor behavior while his father "had a reputation for being disrespectful of female teachers and dismissive of complaints about his son". In 1999, while Mateen was in the eighth grade, his teacher sent a letter to his father regarding an "attitude and inability to show self-control".

Mateen held an active concealed carry permit and an armed security guard license. It was also noted that Mateen had no adult criminal record. According to licensing records, he was a proficient shooter who scored at or above the 98th percentile with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol.

Omar Mir Seddique (November 16, 1986 – June 12, 2016), also known as Omar Mateen, was an American mass murderer and domestic terrorist who killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, before he was killed in a shootout with the local police. It was the deadliest shooting by a single shooter in United States history until the Las Vegas Strip shooting on October 1, 2017.

Mateen was born Omar Mir Seddique on November 16, 1986, at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, New York, to Afghan parents. His father, Mir Seddique Mateen (born October 2, 1956), aka Seddique Mohammad is from Herat who emigrated from Afghanistan in the 1980s and became a naturalized US citizen on November 17, 1989. Seddique Mateen was a secret informant for the FBI at times between January 2005 and June 2016. Seddique Mateen also owns a non-profit company named "The Durand Jirga, Inc." based in Port St. Lucie, Florida, which was founded in 2010 where he hosted a political commentary show. His mother, Shahla Mateen (born December 1, 1959), was taken into custody after she allegedly attacked her husband while he was brushing his teeth on the night of December 7, 2002. Both of his parents first settled in New York, having four children, including Omar. He had two sisters, Mariam "Mary" Seddique and Sabrina Seddique. After being raised in New York for a few years, he moved with his family to Port St. Lucie, Florida in 1991. His family was described as being moderate Muslims and "all-American."