GuardianGruler and the next two officers to arrive on scene, Swat team members Scott Smith and Jeffrey Backhaus, went straight into the club and secured a large area where the first victims had been gunned down, so the injured could be evacuated to the hospital. They were unable to neutralise Mateen, however. He withdrew into the bathrooms, taking a number of hostages with him.
In such a situation, hostages are not really hostages, said Ron Borsch, a well-known protocol trainer from Ohio. Instead, they are “temporarily alive murder victims”. On the other hand, Mateen’s retreat to the bathrooms suggested someone who might not have been quite so ruthless.
“It seems like he was caring a little much about himself,” Borsch said.
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Santiago and his friend were cowering in a handicapped toilet cubicle with about 15 or 20 other clubgoers. Santiago dropped the ground and tried to hide under the sink, though he knew it would offer scant protection. He began to realise this was more than an altercation between two people. Much more.
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Torres recalled hearing Mateen talking to people in one of the other stalls, telling them not to use their phones. “He said please don’t text – that’s the exact words he used: ‘Please don’t text.’”
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One of the most puzzling aspects of what Torres heard as he remained as still as possible inside the bathroom stall came next. Mateen, he recalled, “got on the phone to someone he knew and said, ‘We are doing this already, it should be on the news already.’”
Strangely, the gunman referred in the course of the conversation to three others inside the club and called himself the “fourth gunman”.
“He mentioned some girl’s name,” Torres said, “saying she was inside the club with a bomb vest.”
Torres has no idea why Mateen would have told such a blatant lie, as there was no one else with him. It later became clear that killer did have a track record of making false statements, such as his claim to co-workers that he knew Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
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2.39am
Eddie Justice texted his mother: “Call them mommy. Now.”
He wrote that the killer was in the bathroom. “He’s coming. I’m gonna die.”
Justice asked her son if anyone was hurt and which bathroom he was in. At 2.42am, he responded: “Lots. Yes.”
When he didn’t text back, she sent several more messages. Was he with police? “Text me please,” she wrote.
“No,” he wrote four minutes later. “Still here in bathroom. He has us. They need to come get us.”
2.45am
Manteen phoned News 13 Orlando and spoke to producer Matt Gentili, repeating his claim that he carried out the attack for Isis. Police had various commuications with Mateen. According to Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer, the gunman falsely claimed to have explosive vests, which he threatened to strap to four hostages and detonate.
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4.15am
An initial reconstruction, based both on public statements by the Orlando authorities and on second-hand accounts of internal deliberations from a senior law enforcement official who has been briefed on them, suggests that the police brought the siege to an end approximately 45 minutes earlier than previously reported.
The county bomb squad set shape charges on the walls outside the bathrooms in which many surviving clubgoers were trapped. The plan was to provide those survivors with escape routes while also giving law enforcement an entry point.
The senior official described the decision to use explosive charges as “an extremely aggressive entry” and a decision “you don’t take lightly”. He said it was rare for most state or local law enforcement agencies to resort to such a tactic because they don’t generally have the expertise to perform the operation with confidence. In this case, the closest experts would probably have been at McDill air force base in Tampa, more than 80 miles away.
The charges failed to breach the walls, forcing the police to resort to plan B. They broke in with a battering ram: an armoured vehicle known as a Bearcat.
For those imprisoned inside, it was the moment of salvation. Torres recalled a loud explosion and the bathroom filling with dust. Within seconds members of the police Swat team had burst in. Torres was dragged up and virtually hurled through the hole in the wall, landing on the hard ground outside the club, grazing his arm and side. He was quickly taken to Florida hospital. Later on Sunday, he was released.
Santiago, still on the ground in a pool of blood, said he heard the police arrive, yelling: “Drop it! Hands up!” Then he heard police chatter on a distant radio. Unable to walk, he dragged himself under the stall to exit it. He saw a body in front of the door on the opposite side. There was no one else. He dragged himself out of the bathroom towards the bar area and saw the face of a police officer.
Santiago waved the light of his cellphone so the officers could see him. They told him to lift his hands and drop whatever he was carrying. Santiago complied and dragged himself towards them. They grabbed him by the arms and took him outside, where he told them there were at least 15 people in the bathroom needing help.
“At that point they asked me instructions on exactly where the bathroom was,” he said. “After I told them, they put me in an ambulance.”
Police later issued photos showing a simple hole in a wall, about 4ft high and 3ft wide.
“We were able to rescue dozens and dozens of people who came out of that hole,” the police chief, John Mina, said.
The police have given no indication whether any of those shot at the end of the ordeal were accidentally hit by their own bullets. “The autopsy reports will tell us a great deal,” the senior law enforcement official said. “You can be sure this is going to be examined at the molecular level.”
Mateen himself came through the hole, still shooting. He hit Swat officer Michael Napolitano’s Kevlar helmet, directly in front of his forehead. But now he was outnumbered, by 14 law enforcement officers, and outgunned. “He engaged in a gunbattle with officers where he was ultimately killed,” Mina reported.
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5.53am
Orlando police tweeted: “Pulse Shooting: The shooter inside the club is dead.”
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The estimated death toll more than doubled. At a press conference, police said 50 were dead and 53 more hospitalised. Officials later clarified that the death toll included 49 victims and the gunman.
