Orlando looks to OKC in memorial effort
Members of a community still working to heal from tragedy visited Oklahoma City on Friday to learn how best to honor the lives of those lost and those who survived.
In May, the onePulse Foundation — a nonprofit formed in response to last year’s shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Florida — announced their intentions to build a memorial and museum to honor the victims, their families, first responders and others affected by the attack.
Members of the foundation’s board of trustees were among a group who visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum on Friday to learn how the victims of the Murrah Building bombing have been memorialized.
“When we decided to create a memorial at the Pulse site, we knew Oklahoma City had been the first to do it in our country,” said Barbara Poma, executive director and CEO of the foundation. “You have captured the spirit of Oklahoma, your city, your community, you have honored your victims and survivors and first responders so well.”
On June 12, 2016, a gunman entered the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and opened fire. In all, 49 people were killed and 68 people were injured in one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history, which was later deemed a terrorist attack.
Teresa Jacobs, mayor of Orange County, Florida, said she was struck by how much Oklahoma City’s memorial touched her emotionally as she saw the objects from the bombing still preserved more than two decades later.
“The total connections with reality, the sounds, the visuals, the artifacts, seeing each one of those displays … the little boy, Blake, with his tennis shoe and the little boy with his toys. As a mom, that brings home to me real people, real life, these are my children, now I hurt as if I lost,” she said as she began to cry. “I think that it’s important for us to do that. No life should be taken where tears aren’t shed.”
Among the goals she said she has for the Pulse memorial, Jacobs said it is crucial that it serve to tell the full history of what happened and not to simply focus on a “madman” who took so many innocent lives.
She said it’s important that the memorial and museum cater to the “learning and growth” that can come out of such tragedies, something she said the Oklahoma City memorial had accomplished.
Jacobs said she learned on Thursday of the decision made by the church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, to raze the building after the deadly shooting that claimed 26 lives on Sunday. It reminded her of the difficult decision her community must face in whether or not to tear down the nightclub.
Jacobs said Pulse was like a church in that it allowed for many of the members of the Orlando LGBTQ to have a safe place, “where they were accepted, where they were understood, where they weren’t judged (and) where they could just come and have fun and be people.”
“For that to take place there was so incredibly devastating, and the decision of whether or not we raze it or preserve is still so emotional,” Jacobs said.
Mike Turpen, chairman of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation, said other communities have reached out to the memorial to look for guidance.
“We turned our darkest hour into our finest hour based on how we all came together and how we responded,” he said, adding that Orlando can one day honor its victims and showcase how the tragedy pulled the community together.
Turpen said members of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation have visited Orlando to work with the onePulse Foundation. The Oklahoma foundation will continue to pledge support and keep an open dialogue, he said.
Although the project is still in the beginning stages, Jacobs said the foundation is moving slowly on the memorial and museum for an important reason.
“Each person heals at their own pace, and our community is like one large person with lots of different feelings and that’s why we’re going through a very, very slow process of taking in a lot of input to decide,” she said.
“We don’t want to take something down that we’re not replacing with something that is incredibly meaningful.”