Pulse shooting: One year later
Survivors struggle to cope after attack that claimed 49 lives
ORLANDO - This is not an anniversary, Alex Honorato now knows. A year nearly gone, and his heart is every bit as broken as it was on that day.
Alex Honorato lost his son Miguel Angel Honorato in the shooting at Pulse nightclub on June 12, 2016.
Monday marks 365 days since the killing of his son, Miguel, a 30-year-old married father of three who helped expand his immigrant family’s roadside taco business into a string of Central Florida Mexican groceries.
Miguel Honorato was one of 49 people shot to death on June 12, 2016, when an Islamic State-inspired gunman stormed into Pulse, an Orlando gay nightclub. He opened fire, methodically shooting down patrons one by one on the dance floor and in the bathrooms until police killed him. It was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history.
“I thought that with time, the pain would go away, but no, no — the more the months pass, the more I feel it. It’s going to be a year, but it’s as if it just happened,” Honorato, 53, said in Spanish. He plans to spend several hours Monday in the cemetery, praying over the grave of his son.
The seismic effects of that early morning rampage continue to shake the dead’s loved ones, the 53 others wounded in the attack and everyone else touched by the emotional and physical aftershocks.
“What I want the world to know is Orlando is still healing, and the families and survivors here have not moved on,” said Barbara Poma, Pulse’s owner, who now heads a foundation to help those affected by the shooting. “We are still reeling from it … we’re still healing here.”
A year later, the legacy of the Pulse attack is still unfolding. Survivors are recovering from the terror, learning to live with lingering injuries and paralyzed limbs, while finding the courage to re-enter society. Friends and families of the dead are struggling to cope with empty seats at holiday tables.
Pain, physical and emotional, is the most obvious legacy of the shooting. But it has left other, lasting marks on Orlando’s metro area of 2.3 million, and the world beyond.
The 49 victims, mostly young, gay and Hispanic, became rallying points for activists seeking to advance social changes: gun control, mental healthcare and LGBTQ rights. The massacre challenged the way law enforcement and emergency workers think about their response to such situations.
The violence inspired a tight embrace that extended outward from Orlando to show the world how love rolls up its sleeves and gets to work: donating blood, sometimes after hours of waiting in line — 28,000 pints to the regional blood bank the first week after the shooting. Raising millions of dollars. Adopting orphaned pets. Baking lasagna for grieving families.
Carlos Smith knows victims who received blood from 60 different donors. “That is the reason they are still here,” said Smith, a Florida representative from Winter Park and the state’s first openly gay House member. “It is the strength of the community, quite literally, that kept them on this earth.” But healing remains a work in progress. As the oneyear mark arrives, there is much yet to be done.
Talk to Ilka Reyes about healing, and she blinks back tears as she looks at the place her right pinkie used to be. Yet the loss of that little finger is minor, she said, compared with her shattered shoulder blade and the damage done by the nine bullets that hit her, fragments now part of her body forever.
Those injuries pale against the vivid trauma of that night, and the grief Reyes, 30, carries for her three friends who didn’t survive. Though Reyes, who once worked in a doctor’s office, has found unexpected wells of faith and support, there are difficult days.
“I still have my days when I wake up in the middle of the night and I start crying, and I start thinking ‘Why?’ and I start sweating,” Reyes said.