My Pulse Memory: “Their Phones Kept Ringing”
June 12, 2024

Gentle readers, on today’s eighth anniversary of the Pulse massacre, I’m rerunning my account of that day. The story below originally ran on Pride Life’s website on July 12th 2016 and makes its fourth appearance on JMG today.

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Pulse nightclub shooting

Coordinates: 28°31'10.5"N 81°22'36.5"W


The scene of the shooting

Location: Pulse Nightclub; 1912 S. Orange Avenue; Orlando, Florida, U.S.
Coordinates: 28°31'10.5"N 81°22'36.5"W
Date: June 12, 2016; 8 years ago; 2:02 a.m. – 5:14 a.m. EDT (UTC−04:00)
Target: Patrons of Pulse nightclub

On June 12, 2016, 29-year-old Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people and wounded 53 more in a mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, United States before Orlando Police officers fatally shot him after a three-hour standoff.

In a 9-1-1 call made shortly after the shooting began, Mateen swore allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and said the U.S. killing of Abu Waheeb in Iraq the previous month "triggered" the shooting. He later told a negotiator he was "out here right now" because of the American-led interventions in Iraq and in Syria and that the negotiator should tell the United States to stop the bombing. The incident was deemed a terrorist attack by FBI investigators.

Pulse was hosting a "Latin Night," and most of the victims were Latino. The shooting was the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since the September 11 attacks, and the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history until the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.

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