The pain doesn’t pass
Families, survivors of slaughter at nightclub still have healing to do
This is not an anniversary, Alex Honorato knows. A year nearly gone, and his heart is every bit as broken as it was on that day.
Monday marks 365 days since the killing of his son, Miguel, a 30-year-old married father of three who helped grow 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 June 12, 2016, when a gunman inspired by the Islamic State stormed into Pulse, a gay nightclub. He methodically shot 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 heads a foundation to help those impacted 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 struggle 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 health care 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.”
Healing remains a work in progress. As the one-year mark arrives, there is much to be done.
SURVIVING 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 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.
She’s jumpy in cars. It’s two steps forward for every step back, she said. She’s not only walking; she’s dancing and hopes to start playing softball again soon.
She’s grown close to some fellow survivors, including Juan Jose Cufiño Rodriguez. Those bonds give her strength as well.
Reyes, like some survivors, doesn’t want to talk about that night. Cufiño Rodriguez, who’d gone to Pulse with friends while on vacation from his native Colombia, will.
Though it’s plain the memories are painful to disgorge, Cufiño Rodriguez, 31, leans forward in his wheelchair as he shares them, to be sure his listener understands: It was a war, with ferocious sudden violence and chaos.
“In that moment, I had no idea what was happening. I thought it might be the police or something. I never imagined it was a terrorist. Everyone was running, screaming. … The lights went out,” he said.
His friends fell. Cufiño Rodriguez stayed on his feet, “waiting for the guy until he was on top of me. When he got really close, I stretched out my right hand, to try to take his gun. And that’s when he shot me in the arm.”
Cufiño Rodriguez begged the gunman to stop. Instead he shot him in the right leg and the left knee.
“As I fell, I think he was aiming for my head, but he shot me in the spine,” Cufiño Rodriguez said. “I played dead, thinking that if I kept moving, he’d finish me off. ... I could hear the bullets as they hit the floor, people screaming, blood everywhere. ... Horrible … I kept bleeding, losing more and more blood, ( but) I told myself I couldn’t sleep because I’d die. They put me in an ambulance, and I woke up three months later.”
Cufiño Rodriguez wants to walk again, to prove the doctors wrong. Doctor visits, physical therapy and the occasional lawyer visit punctuate his existence, which otherwise is “a monotony of waking up, then waiting for night to fall so I can sleep.”
BUILDING Terry DeCarlo’s healing is both inward and outward.
When he heard of the attack, DeCarlo rushed to the scene. As director of The Center, a nonprofit cornerstone of Orlando gay life, he spent the next 36 hours passing messages to frantic loved ones, doing interviews and helping victims, three of whom were his friends.
In the days after the shooting, The Center’s storefront headquarters became a gathering space and information hub for Orlando’s LGBTQ community, shipping out water and supplies to first responders, blood banks, hospitals and reporters who’d descended on The City Beautiful, as residents call it. Grief counselors were on hand to meet with anyone who needed to talk. A year later, the need remains, so they’re still here.
“They don’t take appointments,” DeCarlo said. “You walk in the door and you need to talk to somebody, somebody is waiting here for you.”
DeCarlo mines his personal therapy sessions for details that could be useful in a playbook The Center is assembling on responding to an attack. The book will be sent to other LGBT centers nationwide.
“This is going to happen again,” he said. “Don’t know where. Don’t know when.”
That it happened at Pulse, known as a safe, welcoming place, magnified the horror. “It was our gathering place,” DeCarlo said. “It was part of our home.”
Founded in 2004 by Poma to honor her older gay brother, John, who died in 1991 after a battle with HIV, Pulse was as much community center as nightclub. It was not a violent place, said Orlando club promoter and Pulse survivor Orlando Torres, 53. “We don’t have any stories of anyone bringing weapons in the past,” Torres said.
The legacy of the shooting is visible in extra police details, armed security guards and metal detectors that have become a routine part of life in Orlando, in theme parks and nightclubs alike.
The city’s police department and outside agencies have dissected the tragedy to learn from it. Orlando Police Chief John Mina remains in high demand for presentations to other law enforcement agencies.
“One of the biggest pieces of advice I give them is to train beforehand,” he said. “It wasn’t just the Orlando Police Department. Multiple agencies responded. Luckily in the Central Florida area, we had great relationships and great training programs.”
The Pulse building itself stands as a legacy on the corner of South Orange Avenue and West Esther Street, nestled between a Dunkin Donuts and a window tinting business. Rainbow banners with messages such as “Love more, hate less” and “We will not be defeated” cover a fence surrounding the matte-black walls. Makeshift memorials with candles, stuffed animals and photographs of victims sprouted around the property.
Well-wishers from around the world have left messages of support on the fence, on the banners, on the yellow parking bumpers, even the landscaping rocks.
This scene has become a daily reminder of the attack for neighbors such as Philip Van Schepen, 34, who owns a Mediterraneanstyle duplex across from Pulse.
“It does get to you when every time you walk outside, you see the fence and you see the tributes and you see the people, and there are people over there all the time,” Van Schepen said.
REMEMBERING In the aftermath, outsiders flooded the city: President Obama, anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church protesters and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, the Miami Republican who cited the shooting when explaining why he changed his mind about re-election.
Gov. Rick Scott pointed to the tragedy when persuading lawmakers to give $5.8 million to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to hire 46 new counterterrorism agents.
Scott, a father and grandfather, said he can’t imagine losing a loved one in a terror attack.
“I just hope everybody understands that you’ve got to be active,” he said. “Clearly that was an attack on our gay community and our Hispanic community, but the truth is it’s an attack on all of us. And it’s somebody’s family. So I hope everybody understands that we have to be cautious and also take care of each other.”
Gun control advocates invoked the killings when demanding change. The Legislature didn’t tighten any gun rules, but it didn’t relax any either. That’s a win, said Smith, the Orlando Democrat.
“We were able to block the extreme agenda of the gun lobby, which is a major accomplishment in a state like Florida, which is nicknamed the Gunshine State,” he said.
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said he has avoided the political fights that came after Pulse. “I’ve got a different responsibility,” said Dyer, who’s taken to referring to the tragedy as “June the 12th.”
Dyer worked to quickly tamp down anti-Muslim sentiment, to “dispel any anger that might be directed toward the Muslim community.
“We immediately started talking about it as the act of a single person and not reflective of a religion or an ethnicity,” he said. “Instead, we were able to define our response with love and compassion and unity.”
The pride he feels in his city’s response is well-deserved, he said. “If there’s any small silver lining,” Dyer said, “it’s that the world has seen the true Orlando and who we are as a community.”
“You can’t create that type of community on June the 12th if you’re not already that community,” he said.
HEALING It was community that Chris Hansen was looking for when he moved to Orlando weeks before the shooting.
He needed a change, and he saw Orlando as a place he could put down roots.
“I found what I wanted,” he said, “but not in the way I wanted.”
Hansen, 33, a bubbly man with a red beard and a blue bandana, escaped the club when the shooting began. He went “back into the war zone” when the gunshots stopped to pull out victims, he said.
He remains anxious and on edge a year after the attack.
A sudden noise, a backfiring car, makes him jump. He’s forgetful. He doesn’t have a watch or a calendar, doesn’t really keep time. He thought a bartending job at a gay bar might help him meet people and get over his fear of being in public places. It hasn’t worked.
“Every Friday night, I get the same feeling before I go in,” he said. “But I always tell myself it will be OK. I’ll make it home at 3.”
A year later, Sara Lopez is still bereft. All she has left of her best friend, Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, is a dirty baseball cap. She takes it everywhere she goes.
“My mom said I should wash it, but I don’t want to because then it will lose, I don’t know, his energy is there,” said Lopez, 50.
Lopez didn’t expect Velazquez to be in Pulse the night of the shooting.
At 50, Velazquez was not a regular clubgoer, Lopez said.
Friends since they were teenagers in Puerto Rico, the two had planned to spend their last years together “in the same home, with the same nurse, eating cookies on Sunday,” she said.
Before the shooting, Lopez and Velazquez had a spat. That made it harder to find peace, she said. About a week after the shooting, Lopez insists, Velazquez came to her while she slept.
“He was wearing white. He was hugging me,” she said. “And he said, ‘You are OK. There is nothing to be sorry about, but I cannot leave you without this hug.’ ”
“What I want the world to know is Orlando is still healing, and the families and survivors here have not moved on.” Barbara Poma, owner of Pulse nightclub and founder of the OnePulse Foundation “If there’s any small silver lining, it’s that the world has seen the true Orlando and who we are as a community.” Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer “One of the biggest pieces of advice I give them is to train beforehand. It wasn’t just the Orlando Police Department. Multiple agencies responded. Luckily in the Central Florida area, we had great relationships and great training programs.” Orlando Chief of Police John Mina