No closure for families of slain in Fla. club shooting
ORLANDO, Fla. — Questions have lingered in Damaris Benitez Torres’ mind since the day she lost her brother, Martin Benitez, in the Pulse nightclub.
“Did they try to rescue him? Did they give him first aid? How much time was he bleeding out before he died?” she asked after the gunman’s widow, Noor Salman, was acquitted Friday of obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting her husband, Omar Mateen.
Salman’s trial revealed new details about the attack, which some survivors and relatives of victims have waited more than a year and a half to hear. But the end of the trial means some questions might never get answered.
“Now we are left with the uncertainty. It’s worse than before because with this, I thought we would have some closure for this pain that will never leave us,” Benitez Torres said.
The biggest question is whether her brother could have been saved.
Martin Benitez was wearing a watch that monitored his pulse, his sister said. When the family got it back, it read 3:20 a.m.
“We assume that, more or less, that’s when he died,” Benitez Torres said. That was just over an hour after the shooting began.
“My brother didn’t die instantly. He bled out and I know there was something that they could’ve done to rescue him.”
The trial revealed investigators knew within days of the June 12, 2016, massacre but never told the public: that Mateen had never been near Pulse before the attack; that he likely targeted Disney Springs; that his father, Seddique Mateen, was an FBI informant. The FBI has released few details about the shooting, but the trial required agents to reveal some information.
Within days of the shooting, FBI Special Agent Richard Fennern testified March 22, that they had gone through Salman and Mateen’s cellphones and determined that neither had ever been to Pulse.
Mateen seems to have found the club through a Google search for “downtown Orlando nightclub” after walking through Disney Springs the night of June 11 and seeing armed law enforcement officers and security guards, agents said.
Mateen’s cellphone also shows he first headed toward another club, EVE Orlando, but left and went back to Pulse. EVE Orlando is on a busy stretch of Orange Avenue near downtown Orlando, where police officers typically have a heavy presence on weekend nights. That evidence disproved that he was targeting the gay community, a belief held by many after the June 2016 attack.