People hold candles during an evening memorial service for the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shootings at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts on June 13, 2016 in Orlando, Florida.
Foto:
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
As Latin music blared inside Pulse, one of Orlando’s biggest nightclubs, on June 12, 2016, a gunman forced his way in and opened fire on the predominantly gay crowd.
Al final, 49 people died and dozens more were injured in what was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
When the gunman Omar Mateenage 29, from Fort Pierce, Florida, entered the club with an AR-15 assault rifle and a pistol, the nearly 300 people inside were finishing up their night of Latin dancing.
When the first shots rang out, many claimed they did not notice.thinking that the blows were part of the songs, until people began to fall to the ground and others ran in terror, some hiding in the bathrooms.
“I heard 20, 40, 50 shots,” Jon Alamo told the BBC, “The music stopped.”
As Mateen moved through the nightclub, he exchanged fire with the club’s security guard, and as more officers arrived on the scene, they continued to exchange fire. Mateen then escaped to the bathroom, where he took hostages and told police that he had explosives that he was ready to detonate.
While the gunman was in the bathroom, police evacuated those still on the club’s dance floor. Many tweeted or texted asking for help from the inside, including people trapped in the bathroom who hid in the toilets trying not to be seenOthers played dead.
During the attack, Mateen called 911 to pledge allegiance to ISIS.
At the same time, officers secured the building and prepared to enter the restroom by using explosives on the outside wall of the building. Around 5 a.m., police burst through the hole that blew up, then shot and killed Mateen.
At the time of the shooting, it was unclear whether it was an act of terrorism or a hate crime. While Mateen’s family said he had shown anger toward two gay men who kissed the week before the attack, evidence uncovered in the years following the attack shows this may have been a planned act of terrorism and may have had a different target: a Disney resort, before Mateen was scared off by the police.
Mateen had been interviewed by FBI officials twice in 2013.following making comments to his co-workers regarding his connections to ISIS.
He was questioned once more in 2014 regarding a possible connection to Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, an American suicide bomber who had struck in Syria.
Seven months following the attacke, Noor Salman, the wife of Omar Mateen, was charged with obstruction of justice for making contradictory statements to the FBI and for aiding and abetting for allegedly ignoring her husband’s connections to ISIS. The FBI believed that she might have known regarding her plan.
In March 2018, she was found not guilty.
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