Essential Reading On The 1st Anniversary Of The Pulse Nightclub Massacre
One year ago, Omar Mateen killed 49 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. The mass shooting was the deadliest in America's history and left the country reeling. Here's what you should read about the attack today.
Remembering The Victims
The Orlando Sentinel honors the 49 victims with 49 stories.
Orlando's shooting victims at the Pulse nightclub are remembered by family and friends in these 49 short stories as we near the one-year anniversary of the deadliest mass shooting in the nation's history. The men and women who were killed on June 12, 2016, had families, they had dreams, they had futures. They were loved. They went to Pulse — it was Latin Night — to be with friends and to dance.
How Orlando Recovered In The Days, Weeks And Months After The Massacre
In the aftermath of a mass shooting, it is easy, even instinctive and reflexive, to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the violence. But the violence is pixelated into dozens of individual tragedies in which people have immediate, desperate needs. There are innumerable details, mundane and frantic all at once, that need to be dealt with, and someone has to have the presence of mind to do so.
[GQ]
A Snapshot Of The Week After
Was the new Saturday normal seeing police roving through their favorite bars, employing bag searches and metal detectors in places that had once felt as familiar as their living rooms? Was it normal that at the fundraisers held by the area's other two main gay clubs, it felt exactly like going to the gay clubs on any other night of the week, except that periodically people would spot each other across the room and fall into each other's arms and then collapse together to the floor?
The Long Road To Recovery For One Survivor
That's how everything went after the shooting, starting with his belly crawl out of the restroom stall. Angel, a master of the passive, now had to muster any might he had to drag himself forward.
Victims Look To Each Other For Support
Sometimes, Patience insists that she's fine, that the shooting feels less like her own experience than like something she observed. "I don't feel like a victim," she says. "I kind of close myself off from the reality of what happened. I'm detached." But the crutches pull her back. Her mind is brought into focus by the force of her body's pain.
'Pulse Was My Home'
Across the street, I saw a gathering of people outside a familiar looking white building. It took me a moment, longer that it should have, but at last the realization of where we were smacked me dumb. Pulse.
Finding A Queer Tradition In The Aftermath Of Pulse
It seemed that grief had activated in us a dormant gravity. It pulled us to our nearest gay bar, or community center. It inspired a flurry of texts and calls and objectives — How do we help? What now? It brought us together so efficiently that I wondered if perhaps loss was our original creator, if queer culture itself had been shaped by grief.
[NBC]
Supporting The Survivors
Cassi Alexandra interviews survivors of the shooting:
I might still be in shock…I know I'm often in denial. It's as if you know rationally that this massacre happened, but the brain cannot comprehend it, or I should say the heart. The heart and soul cannot comprehend that level of evil.
[ABC]
The Tragedy, Recreated
The Tampa Bay Times brings you inside Pulse with its interactive model, and recreates the horrifying choices faced by Omar Mateen's victims.
