Orlando shooter reportedly violent, mentally ill, looked up to ISIS

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"The photo from Omar Mateen’s high school yearbook is hardly remarkable - a toothy, dimpled smile with a peach-fuzz mustache below a mop of black hair.

His transformation from high school football player to perpetrator of America's worst mass shooting raises questions about whether red flags were missed over the depth of his apparent sympathies with Muslim extremists.

As families of the victims grieved and the nation recoiled at the scale of yet another mass shooting, a picture began to emerge of the 29-year-old killer as a quiet, devout person who in recent years displayed a hateful and violent streak.

Early on Sunday, he stormed a packed gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, with a handgun and AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, fatally shooting 50 people before police killed him. Fifty-three others were wounded, many critically.

His ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, described him as "bipolar," and emotionally disturbed with a violent temper. She said she had been beaten and otherwise physically abused by Mateen during outbursts in which he would "express hatred towards everything". She was "rescued" by family members just four months into a stormy marriage that began in 2009 and ended in divorce, she said.

"He would often get into fights with his parents, but as I was the only one in his life most of the violence was directed towards me,” she told reporters in Boulder, Colorado outside a home where she was staying.

She said he aspired to be a police officer and had worked as a correctional officer at a detention center for juvenile delinquents in Fort Pierce, Florida, and had once sought admission to a police academy."

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