ORLANDO—The people of Orlando grieved and remembered the dead after a gunman murdered 50 people at a gay nightclub in the Florida city, but there was also defiance in the face of tragedy.
On Sunday evening, many relatives kept anxious vigils at the bedsides of wounded loved ones at Orlando Regional Medical Center.
Angel Colon emerged from the hospital thankful to have found his son Angel Jr, 26, alive and in stable condition despite three gunshot wounds, including a bullet that went through his thigh.
Knocked to the ground by the bullets and with his leg broken, Angel was unable to flee Pulse, the popular nightspot that turned into a bloody shooting gallery just before closing time early Sunday.
Colon said a girl fell to the ground next to his son, and they held hands as the gunman moved around the room methodically pumping bullets into people on the ground.
“Then he shot the girl he was holding hands with,” Colon said. “It looks like she didn’t make it.”
“When I saw him, I held him,” Colon said of his son. “I told him in Spanish, ‘Pai, God is giving you another chance’.”
Earlier in the evening, authorities appeared before family members gathered at a hotel and read out the names of those hospitalized.
Some in the audience broke down when they failed to hear the names of their loved ones, concluding they had died in the deadliest shooting attack in US history.
At around the same time, about 300 people gathered in El Calvario church not far from downtown Orlando to pray for the victims.
Many were Hispanics, a reflection of the fact that Latinos were heavily represented among the dead and wounded.
For about an hour they prayed and sang hymns, often with their hands raised toward the rafters as a violent downpour battered the city outside.
But heavy rain did not discourage volunteers who lined up to give blood at mobile stations set up around the city.
“At the central location there were thousands of people,” said Sonia Drudge after giving blood for the first time.
“I was there at 11. It was a five-hour delay. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“My sister’s gay and I have many relatives in the gay and lesbian community and I feel that I just need to do this for my people,” she said. AFP
Claudia Santesimo, a regular at Pulse who waited three hours to give blood, could not get over what happened.
“You expect maybe to see someone getting beat up in the parking lot but not an attack,” she said.
Drudge, however, was not surprised. Orlando is a city that draws 62 million tourists a year because of its amusement parks and other attractions and has long been considered a terrorist target.
“We know that we’re ground zero, that we’re at the top of the list for terrorist attacks because of who we are. It’s Orlando, it’s the happiest place on earth. I’ve been expecting this,” she said.
More than radical Islam, the top concern mentioned by many Orlando residents is the proliferation of guns.
“I’m sick of the silent prayers,” said Corrine Brown, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from Orlando.
“We need to do something about guns in the United States. You should not be able to kill 50 people like that,” she told AFP.
“It’s just out of hand. Guns that people have, it’s not for hunting, it’s not for protecting themselves, it’s for killing people.”
Just hours after the attack and despite the staggering death toll, many in Orlando were already talking about rebounding from tragedy.
“We’re a resilient community, a resilient state, a resilient nation,” Rick Scott, Florida’s Republican governor, told those gathered at El Calvario.
Kathleen Gordon, the vice chair of a local school board, said: “This is devastating but it will not stop the love that Orlando has. We love our LGBT community,” she said.
“They can’t stop us.”