The caller then says that he was able to safely leave the building by running after the shots were fired. He told dispatchers he heard more than 10 gunshots. “I’m gonna stay on the phone with you”.
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The Orange County Sheriff’s Office has released the 911 calls made in the early hours of June 12, as a lone gunman killed 49 people and wounded dozens more before police killed him in a shootout.
The 911 calls have been released.
“We were leaving the club and as soon as we left the gunshots were going like insane”, the man told a dispatcher.
The dispatcher tried comforting the man after he said his girlfriend stopped sending messages.
The first call taken by county dispatchers came at 2:03 a.m. was from a man who had just left the club moments before Mateen began to shoot from his Sig Sauer MCX assault rifle.
He says his girlfriend is texting him because she’s afraid the shooter will hear.
Another dispatcher urged a caller not to call or return a text from his friend, who had been shot three times and was hiding in a bathroom.
The sheriff’s dispatchers sound calm and sympathetic on the 911 calls.
The woman told the dispatcher her 20-year-old brother told her he was stuck in one of the bathrooms at the nightclub.
Another caller said his friend was ailing from wounds in a bathroom in a spot where no one could see him.
Mateen was “saying that he is a terrorist and has several bombs strapped to him in the downstairs female restroom”, according to a log of the department’s calls released in June.
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“I’m home. I’m not at the club”.
