Orlando Shooter Was Turned Away From Different Gun Store for Being ‘Suspicious’

A gun store owner in Jensen Beach, Florida says he alerted the intelligence agency’s West Palm Beach outpost about an incident involving a suspicious customer who turned out to be Pulse Orlando shooter Omar Mateen.

Mateen asked for level 3 body armor, according to Abell, but was told the store didn’t carry it. He then made a phone call and spoke in Arabic before asking for bulk ammunition, but employees did not sell it to him.

“Abell said his team had “done [its] job” by contacting the appropriate authorities, and regretted the fact that “[Mateen] slipped through the cracks”.

The flag flew at half-staff at a cemetery outside Orlando for one of the first burials of one of the 49 victims of the shooting rampage at the city’s Pulse nightclub. He legally purchased the two weapons he used in the attack – a Glock handgun and a Sig Sauer semi-automatic rifle – from another gun store in Florida over a few days before his assault. “He just seemed very odd”. Lotus Gunworks does not sell that type of armor, but refused to sell Mateen bulk ammunition because of his odd behavior.

When news broke of the shooting this past Sunday, the store’s staff immediately recognized Mateen from his picture and realized it was the same individual they had turned away weeks earlier, Abell said.

“If something is suspicious, it’s our discretion”, he added. “We are the gatekeeper”.

The unsettling disclosure comes as federal investigators have been scouring the gunman’s activities prior to the attack, including possible information about Mateen that had been provided to law enforcement and other authorities.

The FBI has been facing sharp questions since it emerged earlier this week that they had directly investigated Mateen in 2013 and questioned him again in 2014 related to another matter about purported links to extremists.

“We gave them information and everything that took place, and that was the end of the conversation”, he said.