How did this tiny backwater spawn two of the biggest acts of terror on US soil?

Grief-stricken: two mourners comfort each other at the Central Florida University tribute
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Rageh Omaar15 June 2016

The summer heat of south-east Florida is ferociously unrelenting. Even by 7am the brutal and enveloping humidity is already hard to take.

The communities that sprang up around Port St Lucie, a two-hour drive south of the still grief-stricken and shocked city of Orlando, are very new.

There is still a very transitory feel about the place. As though people have settled here because land prices have been cheap and it’s the sort of place that one settles in before moving on. Perhaps that’s why this tiny little corner of the vast country that is the United States has one extraordinary and unenviable legacy.

The area around Port St Lucie has been the birthplace of two of the largest acts of terrorism to have taken place in the US.

It’s scarcely believable that such a nondescript, quiet backwater as this, covering no more than perhaps 80 or 90 square miles in a nation of nearly 4 million square miles, is where the hijackers of 9/11 trained to fly planes and it is also the place where Omar Mateen, the terrorist who carried out the largest mass shooting in US history in Orlando at the weekend, grew up.

I spoke to some of the people who knew Mateen best when growing up. I visited the large, comfortable and ornately decorated house of his father Seddique Mir Mateen.

He told me that he saw no obvious signs of his son’s path to radicalisation.

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“I knew when he was being interviewed by the FBI,” he told me, “and they could find nothing. He didn’t grow a long beard and he didn’t start acting in a disrespectful way towards his family”.

But late last night I spoke to those who knew him at school and who had confronted him only last week.

Christian Cave was a childhood friend of Omar Mateen in high school. He was so concerned about the roots of violent Islamist extremism in this area of Florida, even before the Orlando massacre, that he joined a local organisation that has trained schools and colleges about what to do in the event of a terrorist attack.

Yet despite this, he recalls Omar Mateen as a charming, sweet boy who was liked by everyone in high school. “At lunchtime,” Christian told me, “all the different social groups in the school would sit with their peer group. Omar was the only kid who would be popular enough to sit with all of them.

“There was no religious side to him. You would see him at all the local house parties and you knew that he had a nice family to go home to.”

Jerome Kalenuik, part of the same grassroots organisation as Christian Cave, had a more eerie encounter with the Orlando killer.

Omar Mateen was an armed security guard at a gated community where Jerome’s parents lived.

He says that whenever his wife visited his parents and she had to pass through the security gate manned by Mateen, he would be sexually threatening, breathing heavily as he examined her documents.

When Jerome went to confront Mateen about his behavior to his wife he acted differently. He was contrite, and rarely looked Jerome in the face.

“When he did,” Jerome said, “he just looked at me with those piercing eyes that just seemed to go through you.”

As the investigation into what or who inspired Omar Mateen continues and as President Obama prepares to come down to Orlando to pay his respects, one of the key questions that few are asking — but which they should — is: why is this little corner of Florida so inextricably linked with the two biggest acts of terrorism on American soil?

Rageh Omaar is International Affairs Editor at ITV News.

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