Horror hours as gunman killed

As the sound of gunfire in the nightclub grew louder, a patron named Orlando and a female friend took cover in a cramped bathroom stall, contorting their bodies on top of the toilet so their feet could not be seen. The gunman burst into the bathroom, went straight to the stall next to them and shot the people inside.“People were screaming, begging for their lives,” Orlando, 52, said in a telephone interview, asking that his last name not be used out of fear of retaliation from terrorist sympathisers.The gunman, Omar Mateen, was silent, then left the bathroom.“He went out and started shooting outside again,” Orlando said.For three hours on Sunday morning, a life-or-death game of deception played out in a bathroom where the assailant holed up with hostages after killing dozens of people inside the Pulse nightclub. Orlando and his friend desperately tried to avoid becoming two more victims.Orlando said he listened as the gunman warned his hostages not to text anyone, took their cell phones, called 911 to calmly pledge his allegiance to the Islamic State, spoke about a need to stop American bombing in Syria and threatened greater bloodshed if the police moved in.Orlando described moments of surreal quiet as the siege went on and the killer fiddled with his weapon and used the sink and the hand dryer. Mateen checked on the bodies around him, Orlando said. At one point, Orlando switched positions and played dead, and he felt something poking him. He believed it was the gunman, checking to see if he was dead.Around 05:00, the police blew a hole in the wall, enabling some of the hostages to escape, and officers engaged in a fatal final confrontation with the assailant.Much of Orlando’s account corresponds with new information released by the police on Monday, other witness accounts and video evidence, which combined to paint a chilling picture of the hostage crisis that unfolded after the attack.Just before the shooting began, 28-year-old Ashley Summers and her friends went to their bartender, Kate, at Pulse’s back bar to order one more round — a vodka, soda and lime for Summers; a vodka and Red Bull for one friend; and a specialty drink for the other.One of Summers’s friends was polishing the credit card receipt with all sorts of pleasantries for the bartender — “sexy kitten,” “muah,” “you the best” — when the popping started. For 15 seconds, through the pulsing of the salsa music, they thought it might have been firecrackers, Ms. Summers said in an interview. But they eventually figured out it was gunshots. Summers said a friend pulled her to the ground. They felt glass shattering over their heads.They were near a back exit and crawled out. Concerned about what might be behind the seven-foot-high white privacy fence out back, they turned left, into a storage area. But they heard more gunshots coming from that direction, so they went back out onto the patio and used some furniture to vault over the fence. They dashed to safety.Soon after Mateen first opened fire, he was confronted by an armed security guard who was an off-duty police officer, said John Mina, the Orlando police chief. They exchanged gunfire. The security guard was then joined by an unknown number of police officers, the first to arrive on the scene.During these early rounds of gunfire, the police said, many patrons were able to escape. But the assailant retreated deeper into the club, eventually barricading himself in the bathroom, where some patrons had gone to hide.When the shots erupted, Norman Casiano dropped to his knees and crawled to what was apparently a different bathroom, seeking safety in a stall where many people were already crammed together. He tried to call 911, then his mother, shouting, “Mom mom mom mom!” into the phone before the call dropped.As Casiano, 25, and the others huddled together, a wounded man staggered into the bathroom and dropped to the floor. They urged him to try to stay quiet. At one point, as the gunman approached, Casiano said, he could hear shells clattering to the floor and the gun reloading. Then Mateen entered the bathroom.“Just firing, firing, firing,” Mr. Casiano said in an interview at his parents’ apartment, about two hours after he was released from the hospital.He was hit once in the back and felt a hot pulse of pain tear into him, as if his leg had been severed. He ended up being shot twice in the back, both bullets passing through his body, he said.Casiano said the gunman did not say anything, but laughed as people begged him not to shoot and assured him that they did not know who he was and had not seen his face.“All I heard was a laugh.” Casiano managed to escape shortly thereafter. Orlando’s escape took much longer. Hiding with his friend, he could hear the gunman drawing closer, the sound of each round getting louder.As he and his friend positioned themselves on the toilet, Orlando said, he also braced one foot against the stall door.Orlando said he never looked Mateen in the eye, but recalled his calm voice. At one point, after noticing that some of the hostages in the bathroom were texting, the gunman ordered them to surrender their phones.He spoke again, according to Orlando, asking the hostages, “Are you guys black?”“He said, ‘I don’t have an issue with the blacks,’” Orlando said.Early in the siege, the gunman called 911 to pledge his allegiance to the Islamic State, Chief Mina said.“He was cool and calm when he was making those phone calls to us,” he said.Orlando could hear the gunman speaking on the phone, presumably to the police. He spoke about how America should stop bombing the Islamic State.“He got mad and hung up,” Orlando said. He never heard Mateen mention gay people — he spoke only about the Islamic State and Syria, and about the damage he still intended to do.The gunman made several calls, and at one point, Orlando said, he told whoever was on the other line that there were people in the club with bombing vests as well as three snipers outside, ready to take out officers if they advanced on the club.“Our negotiators were talking with him, and there were no shots at that time,” Chief Mina said. “But there was talk about bomb vests, about explosives, throughout, and there were statements made about imminent loss of life.”Near the end of the siege, Mateen began to shoot the hostages in the bathroom, Orlando said.By some miracle, he said, he once again avoided detection, but a person in the neighbouring stall was not so lucky. A man who had just been shot crawled under the stall, grasping at both Orlando’s and his companion’s legs, pulling them down — and exposing their hiding spot. They played dead, “my face against the toilet bowl,” he said.In those moments, Orlando’s phone would not stop ringing, as friends called to see if he was safe. He worried that the rings would draw attention and give him away.As the final battle with the police began, Orlando could hear the gunman loading his weapon, at one point shouting, “I’ve got plenty of bullets.”Then there were explosions and chaos.The police had blown a hole in the bathroom wall, but Orlando said his muscles were so cramped he could barely move. “My shoulders got caught,” he said. “A cop grabbed me and pulled me out through the hole.”His female friend was also rescued. When he looked at his clothes, he was covered in blood, but it was not his own. He does not know if anyone else made it out of the bathroom alive.NY TIMES

Horror hours as gunman killed

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Namibian Sun 2025-12-16

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Horror hours as gunman killed

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Namibian Sun 2025-12-16

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