Trump Resort Shooting Suspect Jonathan Oddi Liked Pro-Trump Tweets
Before he reportedly engaged Miami cops in a firefight in the Trump National Doral lobby last night, Jonathan Oddi was fan of the president’s incendiary anti-CNN posts on Twitter.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/AP
A man accused of shouting “anti-Trump rhetoric” and opening fire early Friday in the lobby of Florida’s Trump National Doral Golf Club was hitting the like button on pro-Trump social-media pages up until days before the incident.
Miami-Dade Police officials say Jonathan Oddi, 42, took an American flag from the suburban Miami golf course, draped it over a counter in the resort’s lobby, shouted about President Donald Trump, and fired a gun into the air. He reportedly waited for police to arrive before engaging them in a firefight. He was shot in the lower body and arrested. Police have not yet elaborated on what they described as the “anti-Trump rhetoric” that Oddi allegedly shouted before the attack.
Oddi’s social-media accounts, on which he “liked” a series of Trump’s complaints about CNN, as well as a recent post by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, add further mystery to the case.
Oddi describes himself on LinkedIn as the manager of a gemstone company and former owner of his own investment firm. (The gemstone company was registered to his own Miami address in December, and it is unclear whether it has any other employees.) Within the past week, Oddi used LinkedIn to like Cohen’s post, which linked to a CNBC article that was favorable to the embattled Trump attorney.
The like is Oddi’s most recent publicly viewable social-media activity. He does not appear to have used his Twitter account since November 2017. But his activity until then appeared pro-Trump. The president, his daughter Ivanka, Vice President Mike Pence, and Trump’s Washington, D.C. golf course are four of the seven accounts he currently follows. Three of the six tweets he has liked are from Trump, two of which rail against CNN as “fake news.”
Oddi’s Twitter account links to several of his Instagram posts. (The Instagram is otherwise private.) Among those posts is a repost of an image from conservative group Turning Point USA that attacks NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for his decision to kneel during the national anthem to protest U.S. police brutality. The post compares Kaepernick to Glen Coffee, a football player-turned-soldier.
“#fact you can’t compare Two different people : 1- Glen is a warrior. 2- colín worries he doesn’t have a nfl career and kneels for popularity,” Oddi wrote in the October 2017 post. “Hell we should stop watching the nfl and just have navy, army, Air Force and public service football teams. It’ll be far more interesting to watch.”
Oddi also left a publicly viewable comment on a post by rapper Ja Rule, who was promoting a protest over lack of heat in New York City’s public-housing buildings.
“Yo what about those peeps in the Island?” Oddi wrote in apparent reference to the Fyre Festival, the disastrous Ja Rule-backed music festival that left partygoers temporarily inconvenienced in the Caribbean.