Former wife of Orlando suspect describes abusive marriage

Sitora Yusufiy thought she was finished with her ex-husband, Omar Mateen. After a marriage in which she said he beat her, confiscated her paycheques and isolated her in their Florida home, Yusufiy said she fled in 2009 with the help of her parents. The last she remembers of Mateen is that he grabbed her arm to stop her from getting into the car and leaving him forever.

“He tried to reach in his back pocket, I don’t know if he had a gun with him, but my mother felt that and she screamed out,” Yusufiy said at an interview at the home where she lives with her fiancé, near Boulder, Colorado. “That was the last time I saw him.”

Early on Sunday, his presence ripped back into her life when Yusufiy’s mother called her to say that the man she had met through Myspace in 2008 and quickly married had committed the deadliest mass shooting in US history. “I had let that chapter of my life go a long time ago,” she said. “It’s somebody that hurt me and traumatised me.” She spent part of Sunday being interviewed by FBI agents, who were inside the home for about an hour. Although officials said they had investigated Mateen in 2013 and 2014, Yusufiy said that Sunday was the first time she had been approached by law enforcement officials to talk about him.

Memories

As she spoke of her memories of Mateen, she lightly touched a tree-of-life necklace her brother had given her and held a bracelet from her mother that she wears for protection.

Yusufiy said she had immigrated to the United States from Uzbekistan in 2000, following her father, who had come a year earlier. She grew up in northern New Jersey and met Mateen around the time her parents started to talk to her about marrying.

She figured if she was to marry young, she would do it on her own terms: “I wanted to find somebody that I could relate to, and find him for myself.”

Yusufiy said Mateen seemed nice at first. He joked around, had a decent job, aspired to become a police officer and respected his family, she said. He was an American but had roots in their shared culture.

“I didn’t have any knowledge or feeling of his instability,” she said. “My parents actually did not feel good about it. But I guess I was in a stage of really wanting to make my own decisions and be independent. So I decided to go to Florida anyway and marry him.”

Erratic behaviour

After about six weeks, Yusufiy said, she began to notice erratic behaviour and Mateen became verbally and physically abusive. He forbade her to call her parents, and he allowed her only to go to her job as a day care teacher. He made her hand over her paycheck.

“He was totally two different people sometimes, and would turn and abuse me, out of nowhere, when I was sleeping,” Yusufiy said.

She said that Mateen was religious, but he had never expressed sympathies for terrorist organisations or radical Islamists. But he did make anti-gay comments when he was angry and expressed intolerance toward homosexuals, she said. – New York Times service