On 9/11, the Orlando shooter’s classmates mourned. Some say he celebrated.WaPo - By William Wan and Brian Murphy, Jun 13, 2016
At a high school in Florida, students watched the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, unfold on live TV. When the second hijacked airliner slammed into the World Trade Center’s south tower, the class sat in stunned disbelief. But one student, a classmate recalled, “started jumping up-and-down cheering on the terrorist.”
That was sophomore Omar Mateen, according to one of the accounts from former students in Stuart, Fla., remembering 9/11 and the reaction by the student who, nearly 15 years later, would carry out the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
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In an interview, Robert Zirkle, then a freshman at Martin County High School, said he saw Mateen excited and making fun of how America was being attacked on 9/11. “He was making plane noises on the bus, acting like he was running into a building,” Zirkle recalled. “I don’t really know if he was doing it because he was being taught some of that stuff at home or just doing it for attention because he didn’t have a lot of friends.”
“Before 9/11 happened, we were pretty straight. We all rode the same bus. We weren’t really close friends, but friends at least a little,” he added, noting that Mateen attended the Spectrum Alternative School, a separate campus in Stuart for students with poor grades or behavioral issues.
“After 9/11 happened, he started changing and acting different,” Zirkle said.
Hours after the carnage on Sunday in Orlando, several former classmates of Mateen began talking in a group chat on Facebook.
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One former student who was sitting in the same class as Mateen remembers the morning of 9/11 clearly: “Teachers said turn on the TV. We see the one plane hit. And then see second plane hit … [Mateen] was smiling. It was almost like surreal how happy he was about what happened to us.”
The former student said Mateen went on to claim that Osama bin Laden was his uncle.
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Both that former student and Zirkle recalled Mateen being suspended or expelled from the school shortly after 9/11. The other former classmate — who shielded his identity because of business clients — vividly recalled Mateen’s father picking him up after school on 9/11.
“I remember his dad walking up,” the former student said. “And in the courtyard in front of everyone, the kid’s dad slapped him right across the face.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/06/13/on-911-omar-mateens-classmates-mourned-some-say-he-celebrated/?utm_term=.d58f1e4b372b
