911 calls released Tuesday by the Orange County Sheriff’s Office show victim’s families became frustrated with the police response to the Pulse mass shooting.
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So far only an edited transcript of Mateen’s phone call to police has been published, along with documents describing dispatchers’ frantic conversations with clubbers trapped inside.
Numerous 911 calls made during the Pulse shooting and the ensuing standoff were made to the Orlando Police Department, which has not released any of the audio so far. “He is bleeding, and he got shot and nobody is going in for him”, said one caller to 911, nearly three hours after the shooting began.
The dispatcher tried comforting the man after he said his girlfriend stopped sending messages. The operator ensures the man that SWAT teams are going to get in and he should tell his son to do everything they will tell him to do. Those records are still part of a public records lawsuit between the City of Orlando and news organizations including the USA TODAY Network. “She texted because she’s afraid that whoever is in there shooting people, is going to hear them”, he explained.
“One of our friends, sent us a text and thinks that he’s been shot”.
Another woman tells a dispatcher her 20-year-old brother is in the bathroom. His ex-girlfriend was trapped in a bathroom at the Pulse nightclub, he said. “We’re pulling victims out”, a dispatcher told a woman calling about her brother, who was at the club, at about 2:43 a.m. Asked if he heard any subsequent gunshots after the initial burst, he said, ” No, as soon as I heard that, we ran”.
By that point, the Orlando police dispatch line produced a busy signal as a flurry of calls started to come in.
At 4:30 a.m., a caller said it was his fifth time calling.
“So I don’t know if they’re in a bathroom with her right now, or if they’re just in the club.” reported one man who was texting with his girlfriend inside Pulse. Mateen, who died in a shootout with police hours later, also wounded 53 people, as the club was crowded with revelers.
One mother called police from her home while her son was on the other line.
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One witness, a young man, told the operator that he was leaving the club when he heard gunshots. My friends got shot.
