Florida gunman was mentally ill with violent temper, ex-wife says

The gunman who killed 50 people at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history was emotionally and mentally disturbed with a violent temper, yet aspired to be a police officer, his ex-wife said on Sunday. (June 12)

“In the beginning he was a normal being that cared about family, love to joke, loved to have fun. But then a few months after we were married I saw his instability and I saw that he was bipolar and he would get mad out of nowhere. That’s when I started worrying about my safety and then after a few months he started abusing me physically very often,” She said.

Sitora Yusufiy, the former spouse of Omar Mateen, 29, identified as the shooter slain by police at the end of Sunday’s massacre, also told reporters in a news conference that she was “rescued” by family members from her ex-husband after four months of a stormy marriage that ended in divorce.

“I left all my belongings, made a police report,” she said.

Mateen, a Florida resident and U.S.-born son of Afghan immigrants who a senior FBI official said might have had leanings toward Islamic State.

The FBI official cautioned, however, that proving the suspected link to radical Islamism required further investigation.

Fifty-three people were wounded in the rampage. It ranked as the deadliest single U.S. mass shooting incident, eclipsing the massacre of 32 people at Virginia Tech University in 2007.