A team of doctors and one survivor of the Pulse nightclub attack, Angel Colon, on Tuesday discussed how the night unfolded in the ER and at the club

It was just after 2am on Sunday morning when the first wounded club-goer was brought into the emergency room at Orlando regional medical center from Pulse nightclub just two blocks away. There was nothing unusual about that – as in any big American city, shootings happen in Orlando on a Saturday night, and the trauma team at the hospital, one of the most experienced in the country, was used to dealing with them.

But then everything changed. This was not an ordinary Saturday night. This was a war zone.

“The patients just started coming. One came, then another came, and then another came. They just did not stop,” recalled Dr Chadwick Smith, the trauma surgeon who was on call that night.

Within minutes the entire ER was backed up with injured young people on stretchers, who had been brought in any available vehicle – ambulances if possible, pickup trucks if not. Chadwick immediately started calling the cellphones of his colleagues to tell them to join him in the melee, telling them: “This is not a drill, this is not a joke, you need to get here fast.”

Among the first wave of about 20 wounded men and women who were brought to the ORMC was Angel Colon, who had been enjoying Latin dance night at Pulse and was drinking his last drink when the shooting broke out. On Tuesday morning he was brought in front of the media at the hospital in a wheelchair with both his legs wrapped in surgical cloth, the first of the seriously injured patients to speak publicly about their horrific experiences.

Colon said he had been hesitant to speak out “as it’s still so fresh to me”. But he said he wanted to tell his story so that everyone could know about the exceptional medical care he had received. “The way these guys have taken care of us is amazing – if it wasn’t for you guys I wouldn’t be here,” he said.

The club-goer was shot in the right leg three times by the gunman and when he tried to scramble away from the dance floor he was trampled upon by other panicked club-goers, shattering the bones in his left leg. At that point he was unable to walk and just lay on the ground as the carnage unfolded.

“All I could hear were the shots, one after another, and people yelling for help.”

The shooter, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, went away for a while to another part of the club, but then returned.

“He was shooting everyone on the floor, making sure they were dead. I could hear him getting closer and saw him shoot the girl next to me. I’m thinking, ‘I’m next, I’m next, I’m dead.’ He shot me in my hand and again in my hip.”

Now with five bullet holes in him, Colon said he kept as still as he could. “I lay down so he wouldn’t know that I was alive,” he said.

Colon, 26, was one of 44 patients who were brought to the ORMC on Sunday morning, and among the 27 who are still admitted to the hospital. Of those, the latest update is that six remain in intensive care in critical condition and 21 on the general wards.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angel Colon, left, is kissed by his sister at a news conference at the Orlando regional medical center Tuesday. Photograph: John Raoux/AP

Dr Michael Cheatham said, somberly, that he wouldn’t be surprised to see the death toll rise given the six who are still critically ill.

The first patient to arrive at the hospital soon after 2am was relatively stable, which gave medical staff a false sense of what was about to hit them. Within minutes four or five people had arrived who were so seriously hurt they did not live for long; in total nine people died en route to the medical center or shortly after arrival.

The drama inside the hospital mirrored the bloody carnage inside Pulse. There was an initial burst of violence from the shooter in which he killed many people on the dance floor, and then he retreated under fire from police to the back of the club, where he barricaded himself inside a bathroom along with hostages.

After the gunman retreated, there was a lull inside the ER lasting three hours or so while police mediators negotiated with the shooter and tried to persuade him to give himself up. At around 5am police let off a controlled explosion, pierced a hole in the wall of the club and killed the gunman in a firestorm.



At that point, emergency responders could reach the remaining people trapped in the club, setting off a giant second wave of activity two blocks away at the hospital where a new batch of up to 25 wounded club-goers were brought in. The ER filled up again to overflowing.

“We had to start all over again,” Chadwick said. “People were in pain, people were worrying about their loved ones, not knowing where their loved ones were. We tried to help them all.”

Dr Joseph Ibrahim said that the medical staff saw “the full gamut of wounds” presented that Sunday. Patients bore gunshot wounds to the extremities, chest, abdomen, pelvis. Some looked as though they had been shot from below.

Ibrahim said that the wounds could also be divided into those that were small caliber in nature, and those that were unusually large in size and that caused horrendous destruction to tissue. That correlated with the two guns that the shooter is known to have wielded: a Glock 9mm handgun and a Sig Sauer .223 semi-automatic rifle that was presumably the cause of the larger bullet holes.

The most seriously injured patients were rushed into the operating room. By 6am surgeons had completed 13 operations, an astounding number for any trauma team. That figure rose to 28 in total on the first day, and eight on Monday with a further eight scheduled for Tuesday.

“The cases just kept coming throughout the day, there was never any downtime,” said anaesthesiologist Dr Sandy Mukherjee.

Dr Will Havron said: “We would treat one patient and after the procedure was finished we would walk to another operating room and start all over again.”

As a sign of how grievously people had been hurt, a second patient, Felipe Antonio Marrero Sanchez, who had been scheduled to tell his story to the media, cancelled at the last minute saying he could not face it. A further indication of the widespread impact of the gun rampage was that people were continuing to come into Orlando hospitals in small numbers, presenting with injuries that they only gradually realized that they had.

Colon said that his ordeal inside Pulse ended after police stormed the venue. An officer grabbed him by his wounded hand and he was in deep pain, and dragged him out of the building.

“The floor was covered in glass. I didn’t feel the pain at that point but I could feel all this blood on me. I looked around, there were bodies everywhere.”

Quickly, he was taken to the ER and the doctors, nurses and other medical staff began their miracle work on him. In the meeting room where Colon talked to reporters he was introduced to Megan Noble, one of the nurses who had been caring for him over the past three days.

Asked whether he had a message for Noble, the wounded dancer looked overwhelmed. “I just love you guys,” was all he could say.

At a later press conference at Florida hospital, survivor Patience Carter recalled the panic of hiding with others in the bathroom as the rampage continued. “We were all scrambling around in the bathroom, screaming at the top of our lungs, when he was in there for the first time,” she said.

“People were getting hit by bullets, blood is everywhere, and then there was the moment when he stopped shooting at the bathroom, and that’s when everyone looked around, and that’s when I first realised that my leg was shot.”

Carter said the gunman had demanded that Americans “stop bombing his country”. She heard him pledge allegiance to Islamic State and, after he finished a call to 911, speaking in a foreign language she believed to be Arabic – although Arabic is not widely spoken in Afghanistan, where his family originates.

Carter, who is African American, said: “He even spoke to us directly in the bathroom. He said, ‘Are there any black people in here?’ I was too afraid to answer but there was an African American male in the stall, where the majority of my body was, who had answered and he said, ‘Yes, there are about six or seven of us,’ and the gunman responded back to him and said: ‘You know, I don’t have a problem with black people, this is about my country, you guys suffered enough.’”

Speculation about Mateen’s motives continued on Tuesday as reports claimed the gunman was a regular at the venue and had messaged several people on gay dating apps.

An unnamed FBI official told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the bureau was investigating the claims.



The FBI has said he claimed allegiance to Isis and other Islamist groups, and his ex-wife has described him as violent and mentally ill.

At least four regular customers said they had seen Mateen drinking at the nightclub on multiple occasions.

Jim Van Horn, 71, told the Associated Press Mateen was a “regular” at the Pulse nightclub where the murders took place. “He was trying to pick up people. Men,” he said. “He was a homosexual … He would walk up to them and then he would maybe put his arm round them or something ... That’s what people do at gay bars. That’s what we do.”

Asked what went through his mind when he saw his picture, Van Horn, who lost three friends in the shooting, said: “We just went, ‘Oh. That makes sense. That’s Omar.’”

He added: “I think it’s possible that he was trying to deal with his inner demons, of trying to get rid of his anger of homosexuality. It’s really confusing to me. Because you can’t change who you are. But if you pretend that you’re different, then you may shoot up a gay bar.”

A spokeswoman for Pulse’s owner, Barbara Poma, denied that Mateen had ever been a patron.



“Untrue and totally ridiculous,” spokeswoman Sara Brady said in an email to Reuters when asked about the claim.

Asked by the Guardian about rumours his son was gay, Mateen’s father Seddique Mateen said: “It’s not true. Why, if he was gay, would he do this?”

But when asked why she thought he went regularly to a gay club, his ex-wife Sitora Yusufiy told CNN: “When we had gotten married he confessed to me about his past that was recent at that time, and that he very much enjoyed going to clubs and the nightlife … I feel like it’s a side of him or a part of him that he lived but probably didn’t want everybody to know about.” Asked if she thought he was gay, she said: “I don’t know.”

Meanwhile the Associated Press reported a law enforcement official saying that investigators who had spoken with the Orlando gunman’s wife, Noor Zahi Salman, were looking into whether the two of them were recently at or outside the nightclub he attacked.

The official says investigators had been told that Mateen and his wife had been at Pulse on a prior occasion and were trying to confirm the accuracy of that statement.



Additional reporting by Jessica Elgot, the Associated Press and Reuters