The gunman opened fire inside the crowded gay nightclub before dying in a gunfight with SWAT officers, police said. This undated image shows Omar Mateen, who authorities say killed dozens of people inside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., on Sunday, June 12, 2016. He was friendly, flirty and trying to pick up other men, as Jim Van Horn told the Associated Press.
Did he do it out of a genuine hatred of homosexuals, or out of some perverse fear of being gay himself? Either way, several regular Pulse patrons remember seeing Mateen before that night. Mateen picked as a target one of the most conspicuously gay examples in a city built largely on a Disneyesque allure of fantasy. Was Mateen compelled into committing bloodshed by murderous Islamic ideology, given what amounted to his deathbed pledge of allegiance to Islamic State, by way of a 911 call? Or was it mental illness to blame, as his ex-wife suggested? Related: The one thing the Orlando shooting might changeīeyond those bloodied rooms of the Pulse nightclub, a pioneer and hallmark of Orlando’s LGBTQ community, the struggle to make sense and assign blame was equally familiar.
As in Newtown, as in San Bernardino, as in Fort Hood, and Virginia and Colorado and the dozens of other mass shootings to have taken place in the United States over the past decade, the Orlando massacre began with a madman with ready access to firearms and ended with a gaggle of the world’s media gathered around a roped-off crime scene. history, there was an odd familiarity to the immediate aftermath. Though Mateen perpetrated the largest mass shooting in modern U.S. Among the many he killed was Eddie Justice, a 30-year-old black man whose last words, “ I’m going to die,” were tapped out in a text message to his mother, Mina. Text messages pinged in and phones blared, angering Mateen. He told the many victims huddling under the barrel of his rifle that he “didn’t have a problem with black people,” as Carter would later tell reporters. In the bathrooms, Mateen paced, cursed, laughed and rambled in Arabic between bursts of gunfire. The ensuing three hours were a slow-motion terror. Forty-nine of his fellow Pulse patrons didn’t.
In the Adonis Room, the smaller of Pulse’s two rooms, Luis Burdano fell to the floor, pulling his best friend and a stranger down with him. Amanda Alvear, 25, recorded her last few moments on a Snapchat video, perplexity blooming into panic as the realization set in. The music cut out, bodies were flying everywhere, in fear or out of injury. Men and men, women and women, about 300 in total, all together for a proper and altogether normal Saturday night smash at Pulse.
Buff sweaty gay men kissing full#
Strobe lights were at full tilt, shot boys were dispensing liquid relief, the DJ commanded the crowd to get its hands up. Early that Sunday morning, moments before last call, the Pulse nightclub was a sweaty, Latin-themed riposte to Florida’s air-conditioned reality. For a fraction of a second, the noise of Omar Mateen’s assault rifle sounded like the big, loud, fuzzed-out bass coming from the stacks of the Pulse nightclub. That’s how Patience Carter, 20, of Philadelphia remembers it. Mourners comfort each other at a vigil in Orlando on June 13th, 2016.