Orlando: Surviving a Dawn of Terror

[photo by timedotcom]

Terror at Pulse.
In the wee hours of the morning of June 12, 2016, the world wakes up to the face of one of America's worst senseless crime. Pulse was a nightspot meant for happy events that turned into a carnage spot for 49 people and seriously wounding 53 individuals with gunshot wounds from a lone gunman whose fanaticism and allegiance support to the Islamist terror group ISIS made him the villain of America's worst mass shooting. At 29, Omar Mateen have etched his name in blood through the pages of both American and world history.

The guilt of feeling lucky to be alive is heavy.
How would you be able to be grateful and tell everyone:" I am lucky to have survived a  terrorist attack!" When all you can see in your thoughts are the bloody faces of those people with you on that very unfortunate dawn of June 12, 2016. How will the victims recover from the trauma when every time they close their eyes, they can only see terror over and over again. These were the shared feeling of those who have survived that moment of terror
Accounts of the crime reveals unthinkable scenarios. Here are some of how the survivors have recounted their horrific ordeals:

Patience Carter recalled and describing the odd feeling as:  "Wanting to smile about surviving but not sure if  the people around you are ready." She further expressed, telling, "I feel guilty about screaming about my legs in pain because I could feel nothing like the other forty nine who weren't so lucky to feel this pain of mine. I never thought in a million years that this could not happen. That my eyes could witness something so tragic. Looking at the souls leaving the bodies of individuals. The guilt of feeling lucky to be alive is heavy when you lay beside individuals whose lives were brutally taken."

Demetrice Naulings has this to say "When you talk to your, you know his mama and you have to tell her... that 'your son didn't come with me,' and the first thing the mother says is, Metri, tell me where my baby is?' He later described the feeling as: "Its like the weight of the ocean walls are crushing uncontrolled."

Angel Colon recalled, "I look over and he shoots the girl next to me. And I'm just there laying down. I'm thinking, I'm next. I'm dead." I don't feel pain but I just feel... all these blood on me, from myself, from my other people.

Jeannette McCoy asked herself the question of why, why am I here? And why they're not?"