ORLANDO, Fla. _ An FBI special agent testified Monday morning about the moment when he realized Noor Salman _ widow of Pulse gunman Omar Mateen _ had known in advance that her husband was plotting a massacre.
It was the morning of June 12, 2016, and Special Agent Ricardo Enriquez had written down a statement Salman gave, asking her to add a passage in her own handwriting saying she had been treated fairly. She went to the bathroom and he read over her handwriting: "I am sorry for what happened," she wrote. "I wish I could go back and tell his family and the police what he was going to do."
That, Enriquez said on the witness stand this morning, was when he knew she was holding back.
"I said, 'You know, Noor, I realize that you knew what was going on. You knew,'" Enriquez testified. "She said, 'No I didn't.'"
Enriquez said he asked her to read her written statement again.
"She began to cry, and said, 'I knew,'" Enriquez said.
The jury in Salman's trial, which entered its third day of testimony Monday, will have to rely on Enriquez's words and the written statements to understand what happened between him and Salman inside a conference room at the FBI's Fort Pierce office in the hours after the massacre at Pulse. No audio or video recording of their conversations were taken.
Enriquez said he was frustrated when he began the interview because he did not have much information to go on. He said he watched some TV news coverage of the attack that morning and knew 49 people had been killed in a mass shooting with ties to terrorism.
"She could have told me she took a trip to the moon and I would have put it down, because I didn't have any information going into this," he said.
In her first statement, Salman described her husband, Omar Mateen, going on websites run by the Islamic State group and watching violent videos. She said he made expensive purchases in the days before the attack, buying a rifle, ammunition, toys for their son and a $7,000 ring for her.
But she didn't say she knew anything about his plans.
After Enriquez confronted Salman about the first statement, she gave another one saying her husband had been talking about jihad and going to the shooting range more often. "I saw these things as a green light for Omar to do an act of violence," Enriquez wrote, transcribing Salman's second statement.
Enriquez said he didn't record the sessions because the room in which Salman was interviewed were not equipped with monitoring devices and he did not have approval from superiors to record her.
However, he said Salman did sign an "advice of rights" form giving her consent to be submitted to a polygraph test _ though the lie detector was not ultimately used. Enriquez said he stressed to Salman the importance of being honest, but never threatened her to make her talk.
"No, I did not," he said. "Absolutely not. I wouldn't do that."
Asked if the interview was confrontational, Enriquez indicated otherwise.
"You get more with honey than you do with vinegar," he said.
Prosecutors wrapped up their questioning of Enriquez as the trial broke for lunch. He's expected to face questioning from Salman's defense lawyers later Monday afternoon.
"It's gonna be a while," defense attorney Charles Swift said.
Enriquez said he talked to Salman informally at first, without taking notes. When the time came for her to give a statement, she asked him to write it down because she was "too nervous," he said. "I said, 'OK, but you're going to dictate to me,'" he recalled on the witness stand.
Prosecutors say Salman gave three statements: the one in which she apologized "for what happened" and said she wished she could change it, a sentiment she did write herself, by hand; a second in which she said she suspected Mateen was planning an attack prior to June 12, 2016; and a third in which she said she knew what Mateen had been planning _ and had been with him as he drove around Pulse days earlier.
During that visit, she said Mateen had remarked about "how upset are people going to be when it gets attacked."
Salman also apologized for not initially being honest.
"I'm sorry for not being truthful in the start about what Omar was planning," she wrote in one of the statements, again in her own handwriting, according to the FBI. "I didn't want to believe it, he's my son's father, I didn't want my inlaws to hate me or get in trouble."
In his testimony Monday morning, Enriquez said Salman told him that, as her husband left their Fort Pierce apartment the evening of June 11, 2016, to go Orlando, he grabbed her and said, "This is the day." She also claimed to have repeatedly called Mateen, hoping to dissuade him, Enriquez said.
On Sunday, Salman's defense lawyers filed a motion asking U.S. Judge Paul Byron to reconsider their previous request to omit from her trial the statements Salman gave to Enriquez.
Byron had already denied that request last month.
But the defense in its new filing argued it should now be granted because FBI Special Agent Christopher Mayo's testimony on Thursday was "subtly, but significantly, different" than what he'd said before.
Specifically, Mayo said Salman _ who was not under arrest during the interviews in which she made her statements _ had said, "I want to go home." Previously, the defense said, Mayo had testified that Salman had asked "when" she could go home _ but never directly asked to leave.
Byron rejected the request to reverse his ruling.
The statements are a key piece of evidence in the government's case.
Prosecutors say Salman knew of her husband's plans to carry out an attack and helped him scout targets and concoct a cover story. The defense says she was unaware of what her husband, a "monster," had planned. She is accused of aiding and abetting her husband's material support of a foreign terror organization and obstruction of justice. If convicted as charged, Salman faces up to life in prison.
Testimony in the case against Omar Mateen's widow began last week. Jurors have already seen graphic video of the mass shooting at Pulse and heard testimony from survivors and the first officer on-scene. They also heard from the police officers and FBI agents who interacted with Salman.
