Widow of Pulse Nightclub Killer Goes on Trial, a Challenge for Prosecutors

Federal prosecutors will face a number of challenges when the trial of the only person charged in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, one of the deadliest in U.S. history, begins Thursday.

Noor Salman, the 31-year-old widow of the gunman, Omar Mateen, is accused of aiding and abetting her husband in advance of the attack, in which he killed 49 people and wounded 53. Prosecutors say she also later lied to the FBI about what she knew about her husband’s plans.

Salman, who faces life in prison if convicted, has denied any involvement in or prior knowledge of Mateen’s plans to gun down dozens of people in the name of the Islamic State. Mateen was killed by law enforcement officers during a standoff after the shooting.

Her defense lawyers are likely to portray her as a victim of an abusive husband who kept her in the dark about his deadly plot. Salman was a stay-at-home mother to a 3-year-old at the time of the attack, and her lawyers may argue that she feared for her own safety and her son’s if she crossed her husband.

Prosecuting victims of domestic abuse can be particularly delicate, given that jurors might sympathize with a defendant they see as a victim.

Mateen began abusing her about six months into their marriage, Salman said in a November 2016 interview with The New York Times, her only public comments since the shooting. While she was pregnant, she said, he punched her in the shoulder so hard that it bruised. Afterward, before they went to meet his parents, she said he told her: “Wipe your eyes. This stays between us, or it’s going to get worse.”

Salman said she was unaware of her husband’s plans to attack the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

“I don’t condone what he has done,” she said. “I am very sorry for what has happened. He has hurt a lot of people.”

Salman was arrested in January 2017 in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she had been staying with family. She has been in jail since then.

Prosecutors have said that Salman made financial arrangements with Mateen in advance of the attack and fabricated a cover story for her husband hours before the shooting. The FBI said in statements to the court that she later confessed to agents that she had joined Mateen on a trip to scout the nightclub as a possible target.

On the night of the shooting, according to court records, Salman told Mateen’s mother that her son planned to have dinner with a friend, identified in court records only as Nemo.

Prosecutors point to this as indicating Salman’s complicity with her husband’s plot. But her lawyers say that Salman was in the dark and believed her husband did indeed have plans with Nemo, who lived in Baltimore. Investigators said Nemo told them that he had served as Mateen’s cover story to his wife when he cheated on her.

As part of her confession, according to the FBI, Salman said she and Mateen drove past Pulse while they were in Orlando a few weeks before the massacre. But court records filed by prosecutors about the locations Mateen cased in advance of the attack do not include the nightclub, raising doubts about Salman’s statements to the FBI — and whether they might have constituted a false confession.

Salman, who holds an associate degree in medical administration, is not expected to testify at the trial, which will probably last about a month. The proceedings begin Thursday in Orlando with jury selection before Judge Paul G. Byron of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. At least 75 Pulse victims have told prosecutors they are interested in attending at least portions of the trial.

Three years before the shooting, in 2013, the FBI investigated Mateen after he told colleagues he was a member of Hezbollah, had family connections to al-Qaida and wanted to die a martyr. That investigation was closed after 10 months, though Mateen was questioned in another investigation that year.

Salman has said she knew that her husband watched jihadi videos, but thought the FBI had cleared him of any suspicions after 2013.

Under federal anti-terrorism laws, prosecutors will have to prove that Salman knowingly participated in Mateen’s plans to provide material support to the Islamic State, a foreign terrorist organization.

“Given the terrible magnitude of what Mateen was intending, it would have been far too dangerous for Mateen to have someone repeatedly present who was not a participant in the offense,” the assistant U.S. attorneys trying the case, James D. Mandolfo and Sara C. Sweeney, wrote in a Feb. 19 court filing.

But Salman’s presence near her husband while he prepared for the attack is not enough to prove that she aided and abetted him — even if she received money, a gift or some other sort of payment for her silence, wrote her defense attorneys, Charles D. Swift and Linda Moreno, citing legal precedent. Mateen’s expenses spiked in the lead-up to the attack, according to prosecutors, who say the money was spent on weapons for the massacre and on securing Salman’s financial stability in the event he was caught or killed.

Mateen, who was the family’s sole provider, made about $30,500 a year. In the 11 days before the shooting, Mateen and Salman went on a spending spree, according to prosecutors, charging about $25,000 on credit cards and withdrawing about $5,500 in cash. Among their purchases: More than $9,000 worth of jewelry, $1,200 worth of electronics, $1,800 on a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle, and $500 for a Glock firearm.

The couple went to a bank where Mateen had an account and added Salman as a beneficiary, giving her access to the funds if Mateen died.

Salman also accompanied Mateen to buy ammunition at Walmart, a purchase she has said was not unusual because he worked as a night security guard and needed the bullets.

Law enforcement officers questioned Salman without an attorney present on the night of the shooting, arriving at the Fort Pierce apartment where she and her son were asleep while the violence was underway and Mateen was still alive. She was not read her Miranda rights until hours later, at an FBI field office, before she agreed to take a lie-detector test.

“I am sorry for what happened,” the FBI quoted Salman as saying during the test. “I wish I’d go back and tell his family and the police what he was going to do.”

Agents took that statement, which the judge will allow prosecutors to present during the trial, to mean that Salman had lied previously when claiming to have had no knowledge of Mateen’s plans.

Her attorneys said she thought her son would be taken away from her and given to a Christian family if she wasn’t truthful during the lie-detector test.