Omar Mateen may have perpetrated a horrible massacre, but his photographs show an ordinary face. Says one description: "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."
However, his looks, though charming or nondescript, give away nothing about his intention to perpetrate the worst mass shooting in America.
Born in New York to Afghan parents, Mateen was in Florida most of his life and studied at Martin County High School in Stuart. He was called a "typical teen who played football."
Still some signs of what the 29-year-old killer was----"a quiet, devout person" who exhibited a violent streak in recent years----do emerge at times.
Even the Imam of his mosque in Florida confirmed that he was a regular worshipper, quiet and rarely interacted with anyone.
"He hardly had any friends," Syed Shafeeq Rahman, head of the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce. "He would come with his little son at night to pray and after he would leave."
Mateen had not talked about homosexuals and prayed at the mosque in the evenings most of the days. However, he did not appear to be a radical Muslim say the fellow worshippers.
Surprisingly, his close friend, Samuel King, a year older than Mateen, worked in the same mall with Mateen and said King himself was "openly gay." His friend in 2009 never seemed to "anti-homosexual."
"What is shocking to me is that the majority of the staff at Ruby Tuesday's when I worked there were gay. He clearly was not anti-(gay) at least not back then. He did not show any hatred to any of us."
Mateen "got really buff," sociable immediately after high school. "Something must have changed" since he last saw Mateen, King added.
But Mateen's father, Mir Seddique, gave another version, pointing out that his son got angry when he saw two men kissing before his wife and child. His shooting was not a terror attack, but homophobic.
"We are saying we are apologizing for the whole incident," said Seddique Mateen. "We weren't aware of any action he is taking. We are in shock like the whole country."
One person who would be closest to him would be his ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy. She called him "bipolar", emotionally disturbed and with a violent temper. There were times when he would "express hatred towards everything", beat and abuse her. Four months into her unstable marriage, she was "rescued" by her family. It started 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.
"He was not a stable person," she said. "He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn't finished or something like that."
With the ambition of being a police officer, he had even put in some days as a correctional officer at a detention center for juvenile delinquents in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Mateen had been interrogated twice by the FBI on suspicions that he had some ties with Islamic fundamentalists. However, it was "unable to verify the substance of his comments," according to a spokesman.
Daniel Kime, who worked with him as a security guard in G4S in the Fort Pierce area, said he had run into him a few times. "Every time I saw him he never smiled. If you said good morning, he'd just walk right by you, like he had a chip on his shoulder," Kime told Reuters.
Another colleague at G45, Daniel Gilroy, said that his anger was "constant."
"Any time a female or a black person would come by he would use horrible words," he told Fox News.
The signs do point to a split personality, but how is such a jigsaw puzzled to be pieced together?
