This gun store owner that the Orlando terrorist walked into just revealed something shocking. Does this prove that the attack could have been prevented if the FBI was doing their job of investigating Omar Mateen?
Do you think the FBI is guilty?
A gun store owner reported Orlando shooter Omar Mateen to authorities weeks before he committed the worst mass shooting in US history.
Robbie Abell, co-owner of Lotus Gunworks, told the Wall Street Journal Mateen came into the store in South Florida in May and asked for heavy-duty body armor like the kind used by law enforcement.
Staff at the store, which does not sell body armor, felt it was a strange demand.
After his request was denied, Mateen asked to buy bulk ammunition.
Though Lotus does sell ammunition, staff shut down his request and refused to sell him anything else.
They subsequently reported the incident to the FBI, Abell said. Mateen had already been investigated by the FBI years before.
But even after Abell’s report, the 29-year-old self-radicalized gunman obtained an AR-15 and a semiautomatic pistol from another store in the area, bought stacks of ammunition, then opened fire on Pulse nightclub, where he killed 49 people and wounded 53.
The store’s owner Robbie Abell told the Journal: ‘The questions he was asking were not the normal questions a normal person would be asking…He just seemed very odd.’
Abell also said Mateen was speaking to someone on the phone in Arabic and was walking around the store texting.
Once it emerged that Mateen was the perpetrator of the worst mass shooting in history, Abell said, Lotus staff instantly recognized him and reported their experience to the FBI.
Read more: Daily Mail
