#GAY BAR SHOOTING PATCH#
A large patch was missing from Elmer’s khaki pants a section of his calf had been blasted from the bone. They locked the door and sat huddled on the floor. Along with two strangers, they climbed up into a dark hallway and found an office. In the corner, a ladder extended into a hatch. The group dove to the floor and crawled behind the counter, then into a prep room. Jake remembers the two of them dancing without pause, except to watch the midnight drag performance.Īt 2 A.M., when Mateen started firing near the entrance to the main room, Jake and Elmer were standing some fifty feet away, at the bar, with two Guatemalan friends. They decided to stick to the main room, with the salsa and the bachata. He and Elmer did a quick circuit upon entering the club, where Biggie was playing in the lounge. Both asked me not to use their surnames.īefore my visit to the hospital, Jake, who had escaped the shooting unharmed, told me over the phone about that night. They had something more in common: Jake was out to his mother and sister, but not to anyone else from his home town Elmer had never told anyone in El Salvador that he was gay, including his parents. Jake liked to cook Cuban dishes like ropa vieja for Elmer. Fitness and going to reggaeton concerts together. They had met on the sidewalk in the downtown neighborhood of Crystal Lake, where they live, when Jake was cooling down from a run. He had gone to Pulse on the night of the shooting with his best friend of two years, Jake, a young Cuban-American from South Florida who also works at an airport hotel.
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He came to the United States three years ago, crossing through Mexico and the border at Hidalgo, Texas, to reach Orlando, where he found work as a housekeeper at a hotel near the airport. Within a few days, all but a few patients had been released.Įlmer, a twenty-seven-year-old Salvadoran injured in the massacre, had been at Orlando Regional for a week when I visited him there, in his room in a tall building of undulating glass on the redeveloped western edge of downtown. It did not, owing in part to the efforts of ordinary Orlandoans, who waited for up to eight hours in order to donate blood, and of doctors at Orlando Regional who, by Monday afternoon, had performed more than thirty surgeries. “I think we will see the death toll rise,” Michael Cheatham, the hospital’s chief surgical-quality officer, warned the press at 11 A.M. Most of the victims died at the scene, and nine almost immediately after arriving at Orlando Regional Medical Center, where the majority of the fifty-three wounded were treated. In the very early morning on Sunday, June 12th, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old Afghan-American, killed forty-nine people during Latin Night at Pulse, a gay night club in downtown Orlando.
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It is a grim kind of luck that the deadliest shooting in American history should have happened two blocks from a Level 1 trauma center. PHOTOGRAPH BY DENIS DARZAEQ / AGENCE VU / REDUX The Orlando shooting suddenly exposed the fragile lives of a community whose members often battle with their multiple identities.