After a lifetime of angst and embarrassment, Omar Mateen was on the verge of realizing a longtime dream in the spring of 2007.
He was about to graduate from a Florida training academy that would put him on a path to being a police officer. He had left behind his youth as a pudgy, often-bullied kid to become a bulked-up bodybuilder. He was learning how to shoot a gun. Now it was all about to fall apart.
At a class barbecue, Mateen told a fellow cadet he was “allergic” to pork, and he got teased about it. Mateen blew up, recalled several cadets who were present, and said he couldn’t eat anything off the grill.
“I asked him if he was Muslim and he denied it,” Roy Wolf said. “I said, ‘It doesn’t matter to me if you are.’ . . . He got mad, really angry.”
A short while later — just a week after the Virginia Tech shooting that left 32 victims dead — Mateen asked a classmate whether he would report him if he brought a gun to campus, documents show. The next thing students knew, Mateen had been kicked out of the academy for a pattern of sleeping in class, plus the gun threat, which officials described in documents as “at best extremely disturbing.”
[For more of this story, written by Kevin Sullivan and William Wan, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...e76e11b12_story.html]
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