New York Daily News

Club survivor dies

- BY TERENCE CULLEN

A SURVIVOR of the horrific Pulse night club shooting — who last year recounted how she survived the attack — died in a car crash Monday.

Jahqui Sevilla, 20, a football player with the Orlando Anarchy female team, was killed after she lost control of her Mitsubishi Lancer, went over a median and slammed head-on into another car, Florida state police told local ABC affiliate WFTV. The woman driving the other car was also killed.

Orlando City Commission­er Patty Sheehan confirmed that Sevilla (photo inset) was a Pulse survivor.

Sheehan added that Sevilla kept private and was putting her life together after the gruesome June, 12, 2016, massacre, in which 49 people were killed — the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in modern U.S. history.

Sevilla was at the LGBT club with several teammates and coach Cory Connell when gunman Omar Mateen began firing on the club’s dance floor. Connell was killed.

Sevilla discussed the traumatic shooting last July for a feature about the team’s recovery in the wake of the shooting.

"There was a VIP section right across from where I was," she told ESPN. “I watched everyone trying to run out of the VIP section. People were trying to jump over the rope. It didn’t matter. He just got everyone in that corner. And that is something I wish I’d never saw.” Sevilla recalled that her cell phone rang out as Mateen made his way through the club, and she feared it might bring attention to her.

“I just kinda just took my phone under my stomach and let it ring,” she told ESPN. “I mean, like, the whole team was calling me at that point.”

Her team didn’t immediatel­y return a request for comment Tuesday.

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