The normalcy in a tragedy

For people in this Florida town, he was a familiar sort of figure: a young man with a troubled background and a short temper who held intolerant and hateful views, often spoke loudly of violent and vengeful plans, and made no secret of possessing an arsenal of firearms.

That describes Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old Fort Pierce man who made the two-hour drive north to Orlando last Saturday night to open fire in a gay nightclub in a targeted slaughter that cost 50 lives, including his own.

But it also describes a lot of guys in Fort Pierce, where far too many young men, especially those from minority backgrounds, are drawn into lives of violence and anger, and where divisive attitudes and powerful firearms are not only acceptable in some circles, but are hotly defended by Republican politicians.

That, some residents say, may be why his volatile temperament failed to set off enough alarm bells: He did not lose his security-guard job (but was moved away from courthouse-guard duty) after the Federal Bureau of Investigation looked into extremist comments he made to colleagues.

"Mostly, people in this county are nice people, really decent people, but you do come across a type of guy working in security and policing, maybe one in 20, who has a real chip on his shoulder," says Tobias Pierre, 51, who has worked for security firms in this region during the past 20 years. "Putting up with guys like that is just part of the job."

Fort Pierce is a politically divided town in a deeply divided swing state – and the issues that divide it are the very issues that drove Omar Mateen: racial and sexual tolerance, violence and firearms.

That is not to say that his transformation into a mass killer was the fault of Fort Pierce. The town is not itself a hateful or extremist place. It's an often-warm-hearted beachside community whose long history of official racial segregation gave way by the 1990s to a more tolerant multiethnic identity. It was around then that the orange-packing industry vanished, causing many residents to lose their homes in the 2008 crash. It hosts a Navy SEALS base and a major nature-conservation area, but sees little of the tourism or industrial success that fill the rest of the Treasure Coast.

But that economic vacuum left some young men here vulnerable to the attractions of violence, intolerance and criminality. And far from being an outsider, Omar Mateen found himself becoming more and more like many of the young men around him.

Betty Bradwell steps back from a big aluminum mixing bowl and shakes her head. "I worry about what's happened to our young people – it really does feel like this community has dropped the ball on them," the 63-year-old great-grandmother says as she helps volunteers prepare lunch for hundreds at a soup kitchen – one of four she oversees – inside an old evangelical church in a boarded-up stretch of this solidly African-American part of northern Fort Pierce.

Her church is a five-minute drive from the media mob around the apartment that had once been Mr. Mateen's.

Ms. Bradwell and her co-congregants have devoted decades of strenuous volunteer work to make up for the lack of useful social services in Florida. In her view, the cultures of violence and criminality have flourished in districts like hers in good part because Florida has, under successive Republican governments, changed the schools, social-assistance and penal systems so they offer only punishment and strict discipline, with nothing to pull failing kids out of a cycle of violence.

"When the jobs were gone, we didn't have anything for them," Ms. Bradwell says, "and if they couldn't manage to stay in school, if they were kicked out or dropped out, the only thing left was crime and gangs. For some of our young people, Violence and crime are the only way to make a living."

Fort Pierce is an exceptionally violent place. Crime-rate indexes list it as having the second- or third-highest rate of violent crime in Florida, itself an unusually violent state.

In 2014, Fort Pierce suffered 12 gun murders, extraordinary for a town of 46,000 (by comparison, Toronto, with almost three million people, has about 20 gun murders a year). That number fell to nine in 2015, but the violent-crime rate – 11 violent incidents per 1,000 people – remains three times higher than the U.S. average.

It is also a place with a lot of poverty: Approximately one in five residents of St. Lucie County, whose seat is Fort Pierce, lives in poverty, which is defined as a combined annual income, for a family of four, of less than $23,550 (U.S.).

Betty Bradwell knows about this from experience. Her grandson Carlos, who had lived in her home, had learning disabilities and disciplinary problems at their local school. He was expelled for misbehaviour, but won admission to a special school for kids with behavioural problems. After three weeks, though, she got a phone call asking her to come pick up Carlos at noon: they didn't have the resources to handle a kid like him and he'd have to leave, for good.

"I knew at that moment that he was lost," she says. "I knew the system had failed him and there was nothing for him here."

Within a year, 19-year-old Carlos had killed another young man with a .45 pistol, allegedly for a $2,000 fee. He spent 10 years in state prison. After his release last year, he realized that he was utterly unemployable and turned quickly back to crime. Less than three weeks after his release, he had been shot dead, making him one of those nine people murdered last year. His killer, caught within 24 hours, was a teenager.

"I felt no anger at that boy or his mother," Ms. Bradwell says. "We were both suffering from the same thing."

The arrest had been made by a new reform-minded Fort Pierce police chief, Diane Hobley-Burney, who has spent the past year shifting the police to the sort of social-work, community-building model meant to keep kids out of crime rather than simply imprison them (and in the process she has reduced the crime rate), but it was too late for Carlos and his killer.

At first, you might not see the similarities between Carlos, a poor African-American kid, and Omar Mateen, whose parents were among the thousands of members of the Afghan middle class who had been airlifted to the United States by the Reagan administration after the Soviets invaded their country, and who moved from New York to Florida in 1991.

But Mr. Mateen's school records, in the same part of town, show him following a strikingly similar path.

Almost as soon as he finished kindergarten, he was facing suspensions for behaviour described at the time as "verbally abusive," "rude," "aggressive" with "much talk about violence" and 31 reported incidents of hitting other students and bullying, school documents obtained by Florida newspapers show. In his first two years of high school, he faced 48 days of suspension, as well as a juvenile-court conviction for assault, until he was expelled for fighting.

He then attended an alternative school for behavioural problems – probably the same one Carlos did – until he was also expelled for misbehaviour. Eventually readmitted to another school, he graduated with mediocre grades, leaving to study at a prison-guard training academy, where further incidents of anger and violence were reported. (He did not seem to identify as Muslim or religious during these years; his violence to that point was pathological rather than ideological).

What is striking is that all his interactions with the school were disciplinary: There was an evident lack of effort, or resources, to put him on a better psychological or behavioural path. Instead, he was allowed to drift into a violent netherworld – a place that may actually have made him fit in better in his northern Fort Pierce neighbourhood, where loud, violent men are a familiar fixture.

The addition of firearms to this anger was the natural next step.

Mr. Mateen's acquisition of extremely lethal weapons, and his outspoken enthusiasm for firearms, was probably the least controversial thing he did: As a security guard, but even as a Floridian of conservative views, it would have seemed strange if he didn't.

When he sought to buy the powerful rifle, pistol, multiple magazines and clips he used in the Orlando attack, he was turned down by the first gun store he visited (its owner said he "looked strange"), but attracted no attention at all in the second. And this is a town with many gun stores.

In fact, his weapon obsession put him strongly in line with the state's Republican mainstream. Florida governor Rick Scott's signature act has been the elimination of most of the state's few firearms restrictions and limitation: From 2011 to 2014, he passed 12 pro-gun laws that made acquisition of powerful weapons easier, quicker and cheaper and voided all local firearms restrictions; in 2016 he has passed a bill allowing Floridians to build legal gun ranges in their back yards.

That violence, however, would only become truly menacing after it mixed with another force that was heavy in the Florida air: easy bigotry and discrimination.

At first, it was hard to notice currents of intolerance in coastal Florida this week – in large part because of Mr. Mateen's act of terrorism. Vigils up and down the coast brought together the county's gay and lesbian communities, politicians, and clergy from Christian, Jewish and Muslim houses of worship.

At one vigil just outside Fort Pierce on Wednesday night, a young crowd applauded as a Lutheran reverend apologized for centuries of Christian discrimination against gays, and clapped even louder as Muslim leader Victor Ghalib Begg declared that "Allah made us men and women – and also gay."

There was hardly a dry eye in the crowd. But long-term residents did raise an eyebrow at this spectacle.

"This is something that you just do not normally see here, different religions working together, and acknowledging the gay community," said Milt Thomas, a photographer and city-council figure famous for leading a 2014 campaign to overturn neighbouring Vero Beach city council's ban on opening prayers from faiths other than Christianity.

"What you're see here is the smaller liberal protestant churches, the Lutherans and so on – the big evangelical congregations that most people attend are staying silent. They won't acknowledge gays."

Slightly more than half the people of Fort Pierce have voted in recent state and national elections for Democratic politicians who favour same-sex rights. But, this being a swing county in America's definitive swing state, they face a tight race this year against a population, almost as large in this town, of very conservative Republicans, a majority of whom polls show to be backers of Donald Trump's candidacy.

Socially conservative Republicans have controlled the Florida's governor's office since 1999, and have made the state among the least receptive to same-sex rights. The state's Trump-financed attorney general, Pam Bondi, made headlines this week after being attacked by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper for becoming pro-gay in wake of the Orlando massacre despite having fought same-sex marriage rights aggressively even after the Supreme Court last year made it a constitutional right.

But Florida has also fought hard legislatively to ban gay adoption, to protect the right of businesses to discriminate on the basis of sexuality and to forbid people of insufficiently masculine or feminine gender access to public facilities (the so-called "bathroom bill").

So when Omar Mateen started being aggressively anti-gay in his language and behaviour after entering community college, he offended some classmates and officials, but was also expressing a set of views that would have seemed utterly commonsensical and uncontroversial to half the people around him. For almost a decade, his angry words about gays and women failed to attract any undue attention – it was not until he began combining them with a new language of Islamic extremism, around 2012, that anyone raised serious complaint.

In other words, his expressions of intolerance, like his penchant for violence, did not make him stand out; rather, they made him a well-integrated part of one part of this town's community – not its majority, but a big and influential bloc.

"This is a very welcoming town where you can be comfortable living as a gay or lesbian, but it is also a very conservative county, very religious, and we've had to come together and find those places where people are tolerant," says Michael Wickham, an elder-care worker and well-regarded activist in the county's gay community.

"I know plenty of people who are out in Fort Pierce, but some of them feel they have to keep their heads down a bit. We've heard a lot of good and compassionate words from the politicians and religious leaders this week, but we're going to have to fight for them to be turned into acts."

For Omar Mateen, the embrace of anti-gay, angry, weapons-heavy attitudes was by one measure a successful form of integration. After all, the combination of divisive cultural attitudes and armed violence has become a cornerstone of mainstream conservative politics in Florida.

The 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for his killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin – an act that occurred just north of the scene of the Orlando massacre – remains overwhelmingly popular among Floridians. Most want to keep the "stand your ground" law that allowed Mr. Zimmerman to kill without penalty, and among state Republicans he remains more popular than President Barack Obama.

Whatever Omar Mateen's psychological or ideological motives, whatever mix of homophobia, self-hating homosexuality, Islamic extremism and ego-driving braggadocio he had adopted, he was becoming a more normal member of his community – or at least of a certain very masculine, very conservative corner of it.

Only in the wake of the horror he unleashed is it becoming apparent to people here, and their leaders, that Mr. Mateen got away with it because his views and his utterances were so completely, frighteningly normal.

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