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On vacation in Orlando, three young women went out dancing: Patience Carter, her friend Tiara Parker, and Parker’s cousin, Akyra Murray. Carter later told PBS they were having so much fun at Pulse that they talked about coming back.
Then, just after two in the morning on June 12, 2016, gunfire began. In Carter’s recollection, it took a moment to understand the noise. She watched the crowd react, dropped to the floor, and eventually took shelter with her friends in a bathroom. This was a night that began with plans for another visit. Akyra would not survive it.
The FBI says approximately 300 people were at the Orlando nightclub when Omar Mateen opened fire. Forty-nine people were murdered and 58 were wounded. To understand how that night unfolded, we have two kinds of record: the timed communications of the police response and the account of someone trapped inside. They do not offer a camera’s-eye view of every moment. Together, they tell us what can be said—and where a clock cannot capture the experience.
The background begins years before Pulse. In May 2013, Mateen was working as a contract security guard at a courthouse. According to FBI director James Comey’s briefing immediately after the attack, coworkers reported statements about terrorism that were inflammatory and contradictory. Among them were claims of connections to groups that were enemies of each other.
The FBI opened a preliminary investigation. Over the next ten months, agents reviewed records, followed Mateen, recorded conversations, used confidential sources, and interviewed him twice. Comey said Mateen acknowledged making the reported remarks but told agents he had spoken in anger because he believed coworkers were discriminating against him for being Muslim. Investigators closed that inquiry after ten months.
His name surfaced again in 2014 during an investigation of a Florida man who had died as a suicide bomber in Syria. The FBI found that the two men had known each other casually through the same mosque, but, Comey said, found no ties of consequence between them. Agents interviewed Mateen again; the inquiry continued without further focus on him. Those earlier contacts matter to the story, but they do not establish that investigators knew he would attack Pulse. Comey’s briefing described the FBI’s understanding on June 13, while its investigation was still in its earliest days.
Back in Orlando, Carter, Parker, and Murray chose Pulse for their night out. Shortly after two, Mateen entered with a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun, according to PBS’s account. Carter remembers confusion before she understood that people were running from gunfire.
The FBI’s timeline, drawn from Orlando police radio traffic, begins at approximately 2:02 a.m.: multiple shots reported at Pulse. More officers arrived by 2:04. At about 2:08, officers from several agencies entered and engaged the shooter. SWAT was called out at 2:18.
By then, the attack had become more than an initial burst of gunfire. The FBI describes Mateen barricading himself with victims in a bathroom. Carter, Parker, and Murray were hiding there, crowded into a stall with other people. In her account, she could hear screaming elsewhere in the club, then footsteps approaching. She says Mateen fired into the bathroom. Carter was shot in both legs. She stayed on the floor and tried to remain quiet.
At approximately 2:35 a.m., Mateen called 911 from inside Pulse. He said he had carried out the shooting and pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State. Orlando police crisis negotiators spoke with him at roughly 2:48, 3:03, and 3:24.
In those conversations, the FBI said, he described himself as an Islamic soldier and referred to American bombing in Syria and Iraq. He also threatened to set off explosives. These were his claims, not findings that explosives were present. An immediate search of his vehicle and the club found no explosive vest or improvised explosive device.
At the June 13 briefing, Comey said the FBI had found no indication so far that an outside organization had directed the plot or that Mateen belonged to a network. He also said investigators were examining what role anti-gay bigotry might have played. The choice of a gay nightclub had an unmistakable impact on Orlando’s LGBTQ+ community; it should not be used to turn an unanswered question about every part of Mateen’s motive into a certainty.
For people inside, the hours did not pass as entries on a dispatch log. Carter said she heard Mateen’s call and feared she would not get out. Outside, officers were working to reach those trapped.
At about 4:21 a.m., police removed an air-conditioning unit from a dressing-room window so victims could evacuate. Eight minutes later, people being rescued told officers that Mateen had threatened to put bomb vests on victims. The threat added urgency, though no such devices were found.
At approximately 5:02, police and the county hazardous-device team began breaking through a wall with an explosive charge and an armored vehicle. Carter recalled Mateen firing at people in the bathroom shortly before the wall came down. The FBI’s account, based on police radio communications, says there were no *reports* of shots inside between the officers’ initial exchange of fire and the final breach. That is a description of what the radio recorded, not a reason to erase Carter’s account of what she experienced.
Police radio traffic reported shots at 5:14. At 5:15, it reported officers engaging Mateen and that he was down. He was killed at the scene. There was no later search for the gunman: the confrontation at Pulse ended the attack.
The aftermath began with medical care, identification, and families waiting for news. Carter spent six days in an Orlando hospital and underwent surgery on her leg. Parker, who had been shot in the stomach, survived. Akyra Murray did not. Carter later told PBS that walking to class had become easier over the following year, while emotional recovery remained different from day to day.
The FBI led a federal investigation. Its later account classifies the shooting as an act of terrorism. That conclusion describes the attack; it does not mean that every question about Mateen’s precise motivations has a simple answer. Forty-nine people were killed. Fifty-eight others were wounded. Those numbers are essential to understanding the scale, but they cannot describe all the lives changed around each person.
The physical site has changed. According to the FBI’s account, the Pulse building was demolished in March 2026. In an update dated October 6, 2026, the City of Orlando described plans for a permanent memorial shaped by an advisory committee that included families, survivors, LGBTQ+ community members, and other Orlando residents. At that point, the city expected construction to begin that fall and completion by the end of 2027. Those were the city’s stated plans, not a promise that the work was already finished.
For Carter and her friends, Pulse had first been a place they wanted to visit again. The account of what happened there necessarily follows the shooter, the calls, and the police response. It should end somewhere else: with the people who went to dance, those who helped others escape, those who survived with injuries, and the 49 whose return home never came.