As darkness returned to Orlando Sunday, Sonia Parra lit her lone candle on the corner of Orange and Grant downtown.
Parra stood about three blocks from Pulse, where less than 18 hours earlier 50 people were gunned down in the worst mass shooting in American history.
She and her partner, Andrea Parra, had already confirmed that they had lost five friends in the massacre. The news came from family members of the dead. But Sonia was lighting her candle now for the seven other friends she hadn’t heard from since the shooting.
“All we can do now is wait and pray,” she said. “But we are not safe anywhere anymore.”
As midnight approached, the city police were still sticking to the grim statistic that had stunned the world Sunday morning: 50 people shot dead, 53 others wounded in a one-man attack on Pulse, a gay nightclub.
The mood in downtown Sunday night was pensive and anxious. Dozens of people stood outside police tape that kept them three blocks back from Pulse, to show their respect for the dead. And to wait. For any news.
Police had them so far away that they couldn’t even see Pulse from where they were standing. Which was perhaps for the best, since the dead were still being carried out.
“I am just here to pay my respects,” said Angie Wiechart, from nearby Apopka. She was carrying a dozen roses but had no place to put them, since a memorial spot can’t be established yet at Pulse.
“I am sad and heartbroken,” Wiechart said. “First I thought it was a hate crime. I have friends who are gay and I don’t want bad things to happen to them or anyone else.”
Standing in the rain, Antonette Gonzalez and Rafael Martinez stood holding a sign showing Mickey Mouse praying for the dead and wounded.
“Here is where you bring your family,” said Gonzalez. “This is supposed the be a happy, laid-back place. Now we are scared to walk outside because you don’t know what might happen.”
But Gonzalez said she has seen this before. She lived in New York City on 9/11, the largest terrorist attack on American soil, and was a volunteer with the Red Cross, assisting first responders.
Early Sunday morning, she got a call from her daughter informing her that he nephew had left Pulse a mere 10 minutes before the massacre began. While her nephew got out, one of his friends didn’t.
“I talked to him this morning and he was crying and shaken,” Gonzalez said. “We are all shaken. And praying.”
Trenton Venezia was also rattled. He was on his way to Pulse Saturday night when got called in at the last minute for work.
“None of us would have imagined our little bar on Orange Avenue would be the target of a terrorist attack,” Venezia said, adding that his phone has been blowing up from people who were wondering if he made it to Pulse Saturday.
For every call that Venezia got, he made one looking for his friends who were actually at Pulse Saturday night. He found some, but has not heard from others, despite dozens of calls and text messages.
“This has shattered this community,” Venezia said. “But as soon as it broke, it started to come back with vigils, people giving blood and people responding. We will come back 10 times stronger.”
Inside the barricade, Pastor Paul Vallo of Christ Church of Orlando was keeping his doors open all night to give first responders a place to relax and eat.
“The potential for devastation is here, but the potential to see resilience is also here,” Vallo said. “Compassion is evident and the best of us always comes out in the end.”
Vallo’s church is but 600 feet away from Pulse. He said occasionally a Pulse patron might park in their parking lot, but they have never had any trouble with the club.
“Their hours are different from ours,” he said. “We are daytime. They are nighttime.”
Adding to the anxiety was the slow release of names. The city of Orlando has been posting the names of the confirmed dead on its website; as of 1 a.m. Monday, the city had put up 10 names.
“I have several friends who are still missing and I am afraid to look at the list. I am very concerned,” said Frederick Cotto-Lewis, who along with his partner Rene, is active in the LBGT community through his church. “I know I will have to deal with this in the coming days.”
Cotto-Lewis said he has found at least three of his friends. One, he said, recounted hearing the first gunshots and confusing them for sound effects in a Drake song.
“Then the song went off and kept hearing the pops,” Cotto-Lewis said. “He ducked and he saw the bartender get hit. He started running out and turned around and just saw bodies. For the survivors, this is gonna be in their memories for a long time.”
Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, who represents this district in Congress, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Omar Mateen was “someone whose heart was full of hatred, yet clever enough not to be on the FBI’s radar.”
He lamented the fact that Mateen used a semi-automatic assault rifle capable or firing more than 500 rounds a minute.
“Most of the people who died, died within two to three minutes after being shot,” Grayson said. “There is no recreational use for that kind of gun whatsoever – other than to kill people.”
Some gun-rights groups responded to Sunday’s massacre by saying that the solution was not to regulate assault weapons but to ensure that more people had guns with which to defend themselves.
Stanley Hill, a native of Kennesaw, led a group of three other friends to the site of the shooting late Sunday. Saturday night was Latin night, but Friday night is usually hip-hop night. Friday is when you would usually find his crew at Pulse, which they said was a good spot to go and have drinks. They said it was a free and open space where no one was ever checked for weapons.
Hill’s family was in town this weekend from Atlanta, so he asked his younger brother if he wanted to hit Pulse on Saturday. His brother wasn’t feeling it.
“I was still going to go, but I decided to stay in. I was glad I didn’t go. If I had gone and took my brother, how was I going to protect him?” Hill said. “But I had a friend who was there and who got shot. He is alive and hopefully he will make a full recovery.”
The Parras were also close to going to Pulse Saturday night. They had gone to another bar Saturday to watch Colombia play Costa Rica in soccer. A friend called and invited them to Pulse, but they were tired and wanted to get home.
“We actually drove by it at 12:30 a.m. and everything looked fine,” Andrea Parra said. “But we were tired and went home. We thought we would catch them some other time.”
The shooting began about 90 minutes later.
About the Author
