“I remember his dad walking up,” he said. The first former classmate - who was in the classroom - vividly recalled Mateen’s father picking him up after he got in trouble. When he arrived at the dean’s office, Mateen was also there, apparently for saying rude things about Americans deserving to be attacked, said this student, who was not in the classroom to witness the comments. “I was sleeping in class and woke up to see people jumping off buildings, so I started swearing and they sent me up,” the former student said. That third student spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared being bombarded by media requests. In a Facebook post, another student similarly described Mateen’s standing up and cheering on 9/11.Ī third classmate said he distinctly remembers Mateen’s actions that day because both of them were sent to the dean’s office at the same time for acting out when the towers were hit. So the teacher grabbed him,” he said, and sent him to the dean’s office. “The teacher could tell we wanted to hurt him.
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He recalled others in the class growing angry. The ex-classmate spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear that business clients would find out that he attended a school for poorly behaving students.
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He said he shot them and his uncle taught him how to shoot them.” “But he talked about shooting AK-47s. . . “Back then, we didn’t even really know who Osama bin Laden was,” the classmate said. The former student said Mateen stood up after the second tower was hit and claimed that Osama bin Laden was his uncle. It was almost like surreal how happy he was about what had happened to us.” One former student who was sitting in the same class as Mateen said he remembers the morning of 9/11 clearly: “Teachers said, ‘Turn on the TV.’ We see the one plane hit. “After 9/11 happened, he started changing and acting different.”Īt the time, Mateen was attending the Spectrum alternative school, a campus in Stuart, Fla., for students with behavioral issues. We weren’t really close friends, but friends at least a little,” he said. “I don’t really know if he was doing it because he was being taught some stuff at home or just doing it for attention because he didn’t have a lot of friends. “He was making plane noises on the bus, acting like he was running into a building,” Zirkle recalled.
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Robert Zirkle, then a freshman in the Martin school district, said that after 9/11, he saw Mateen excited and making fun of how America was attacked.
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The Martin County School District referred all questions about Mateen’s time as a student to the FBI. His unusual behavior that day was also corroborated by other classmates in public posts on Facebook. 11, 2001, when they were watching the attack on the World Trade Center unfold on live TV.įour classmates said Mateen cheered and made mocking comments, which got him pulled from class and may have led to his departure from the school. Some of Mateen’s high school classmates pinpointed a particularly strange moment on Sept. He switched jobs constantly and became increasingly frustrated, unpredictable, sporadically religious and prone to anger. But there were also hints of darkness in Mateen’s life, according to interviews with relatives, friends, ex-classmates, former co-workers and acquaintances: Being Afghan American meant he stood out in a small South Florida town and was bullied in school. Mateen and his family had the typical profile of striving immigrants in this country. “He was open with his picture on the sites he was easy to recognize,” said Cedeno, 23, of Orlando, who said he was also contacted by Mateen at least a year ago on a dating app. (Deirdra O'Regan/The Washington Post)Ĭord Cedeno said he had also seen Mateen inside Pulse before, standing at the bar with a drink. The gunman who killed at least 49 people in a shooting rampage at an Orlando nightclub has been identified as 29-year-old Omar Mateen.