The ex wife of suspected Orlando gay bar shooter Omar S. Mateen claims, he used to beat her when they were married.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Sitora Yusifiy said Mateen was violent and emotionally unstable.
29-year-old Mateen died Sunday morning after he was killed by police for killing 50 people during an early morning assault rifle attack at a gay club, Pulse nightclub, in Orlando Florida.
“He was not a stable person,” the ex-wife told the Post. “He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.”
She told Fox News that few months after they were married, she saw that he was unstable and bipolar and that was when she started worrying about her safety. He didn’t allow her speak to her family. She said:
“He prevented me from speaking to my family, he held me hostage, he was mentally unstable, he was mentally ill ad obviously disturbed”.
She said when they first met, “he seemed like a normal human being,”.
She added that after the beatings became the norm in the home, her family flew to Florida to help her flee from their Fort Pierce home.
The woman said she fled with none of her possessions. She said, in the wake of the attack on Sunday, that she feels lucky to be alive.
Omar S. Mateen
Sometime after 2 a.m. Sunday, Omar Mateen dialed Orlando’s 911 service to alert the dispatcher to the carnage unfolding at one of the city’s most popular gay bars. He spelled out his full name and location, and then he offered an explanation: He was a follower of the Islamic State.
By 5 a.m., Mateen lay dead, killed in a gun battle with police in a violent finale to the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. But while the enormity of the crime was quickly apparent, authorities were just beginning to sort through the jumble of motives that may have led the 29-year-old immigrant’s son to open fire on scores of young men and women inside the Pulse nightclub.
While Mateen claimed allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, no evidence had emerged by late Sunday pointing to actual ties to terrorist groups or a significant association with jihadist causes. And although family members said Mateen had expressed anger about homosexuality, the shooter had no record of previous hate crimes.
He had twice come under investigation by the FBI — once for comments suggesting an affinity for Islamist groups, and a second time for vague connections to another Florida man who traveled to Syria to become a suicide bomber. Neither probe turned up evidence of wrongdoing, and Mateen had a blemish-free record when he applied for a Florida license to carry concealed weapons and again when he legally purchased two firearms, including an assault-style semiautomatic rifle, just a few days before the shootings.
Indeed, as the first day of the investigation neared an end, U.S. officials struggled over how exactly to label the attack, which President Obama described on Sunday as both “an act of terror and an act of hate.”