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June 15, 2016 7:27 am
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Co-Worker of Orlando Terrorist Says His Warnings of Shooter’s Antisemitic, Racist Behavior Fell on Deaf Ears

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avatar by Lea Speyer

Orlando shooter Omar Mateen. Photo: Myspace.

Orlando shooter Omar Mateen. Photo: Myspace.

A former co-worker of the Orlando massacre terrorist said his numerous warnings to his then employers of Omar Mateen’s repeated antisemitic, racist and violent slurs fell on deaf ears, the LA Times reported on Tuesday.  

“I complained multiple times that he was dangerous, that he didn’t like blacks, women, lesbians and Jews,” Daniel Gilroy — who worked with Mateen for approximately a year as a G4S security guard at PGA Village South in Port St. Lucie, Fla. — told the paper. “You meet bigots, but he was above and beyond. He was always angry, sweating, just angry at the world.”

On several occasions in Gilroy’s presence, Mateen issued threats of violence, including saying he wished he could kill all black people.

Gilroy told the LA Times that he quit his job after Mateen began harassing him, sending his 20-30 text messages and more than a dozen phone calls a day. G4S, Gilroy said, failed to intervene.

“I saw this coming,” he said, adding that Mateen was “unhinged and unstable.”  

Early Sunday morning, at around 2 am, Mateen — a devout Muslim who pledged allegiance to ISIS while committing his shooting rampage — entered Pulse, a popular LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, armed with an assault rifle and pistol. Mateen opened fire on club-goers, killing 49 people and wounding at least 53. Following a tense, three-hour standoff with law enforcement officers while people were being held hostage inside the club, police raided the premises by using an armored vehicle to crash into the building. Mateen was killed in the process.

FBI officials revealed they had investigated Mateen after he had boasted to co-workers that he knew Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnev, the brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombing. In one of his calls to 911 on Sunday, Mateen brought up the Tsarnev brothers, calling them his “homeboys.”

After being questioned twice, Mateen was ultimately found not to pose a concrete threat, and was put on a watchlist. “Those interviews turned out to be inconclusive, so there was nothing to keep the investigation going,” said FBI Assistant Special Agent Ronald Hopper in a press briefing on Sunday. At the time of the attack, Mateen was not under surveillance, Hopper said.

Matten’s parents, who hail from Afghanistan, told the media that their son was possibly motivated to carry out the attack after being outraged over seeing two men kiss in public in Miami.

Sunday’s attack is the deadliest shooting in US history, ahead of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, which left 32 dead, and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which 26 people were killed.

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