The man police say killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Sunday had visited the club at least a dozen times before carrying out his attack, a witness told the Orlando Sentinel on Monday.
The suspected shooter, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, may have also used gay dating apps according to reports from MSNBC and the Los Angeles Times.
Three other witnesses confirmed that they had also seen at the nightclub more than once before.
"Sometimes he would go over in the corner and sit and drink by himself, and other times he would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent," one witness, Ty Smith, told the Sentinel.
"We didn't really talk to him a lot," he added. "But I remember him saying things about his dad at times. He told us he had a wife and child."
Smith later told The Canadian Press that Mateen said that he "couldn't drink when he was at home—around his wife, or family. His father was really strict."
"He's been going to this bar for at least three years," Chris Callen, who performs at Pulse under the name Kristina McLaughlin, told The Canadian Press.
Smith and Callen say that they stopped talking to Mateen when he pulled a knife on them after they made a religious comment.
"He said if he ever messed with him again, you know how it'll turn out," Callen said.
An Orlando man told MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Monday that he had seen photos of Mateen on the gay dating apps Grindr, Adam4Adam, and Jack'd over the last several years. At least two of the man's friends had been contacted by Mateen on the apps.
"He was very creepy in his messages, and I blocked him immediately," the man said.
Kevin West, another regular at Pulse nightclub, told the Los Angeles Times that he chatted with Mateen on and off for a year on the gay dating app Jack’d, but had never met him in person. Incredibly, West said he met him for the first time as he was dropping a friend off at Pulse on Saturday night.
“He walked directly past me," West said. "I said, ‘Hey,’ and he turned and said, ‘Hey,’” and nodded his head, West said. “I could tell by the eyes.”
The reports come after Samuel King, a drag queen, told The Daily Beast that he had befriended Mateen while the two worked next door to each other in Fort Pierce. King said that Mateen had seemed generally accepting of the fact that he and his friends were openly gay. King said that he even recalls Mateen going at least once to the nightclub where King performed.