Meet the civilian heroes of the attack in Orlando
Early Sunday morning, gunman Omar Mateen opened fire in Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. With 49 dead and 53 injured, it was the deadliest mass shooting in American history. As the victims are mourned, these are the stories of the heroes who helped save lives during and after the shooting.
Imran Yousuf
Yousuf, a 24-year-old bouncer at Pulse and U.S. Marine who served in Afghanistan, saved between 60 and 70 lives early Sunday morning. When he heard the initial gunshots, he found himself in an entirely different combat zone. The veteran told CBS News that he was able to lead the shocked, catatonic clubgoers to safety through a door he unlatched in the back hallway of the nightclub.
“Either we all stay there and we all die, or I could take the chance,” he said. “I jumped over to open that latch [and] we got everyone that we can out of there.”
Yousuf, a Hindu, told CBS through tears that he wished he could have saved more.
Brenda McCool
The mother of 12 was at Pulse with her 21-year-old son Isaiah Henderson; the nightclub was a spot the pair frequented. When McCool saw Mateen brandishing a weapon, she told her son to get down, the New York Daily News reported. McCool died in the attack after taking a bullet for her son.
McCool twice beat cancer and moved around the country, eventually settling in Florida. She lived there with six of her children, according to the NBC story.
“She was a fighter,” childhood friend Noreen Vaquer told the Orlando Sentinel. “She doesn’t take nothing from nobody.”
Ray Rivera
Rivera, known in some circles as DJ Infinite, knew it was closing time for Pulse and started to play mellow reggae music around 2 a.m. on Sunday. Rivera, who had been DJing on the patio that night, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that he turned the music down when he heard a suspicious noise. Upon hearing the noise a second time and watching frantic crowds rush out of the club, he realized that he was hearing the sound of gunshots.
Rivera stopped the music and allowed a young man and woman to hide under his DJ booth, CNN reported. The man escaped to the parking lot, leaving the panic-stricken woman behind. Rivera told CNN that he calmed the woman down but knew they couldn’t stay hidden for long.
“As soon as there was a break in the shots, I kind of just pushed her and said, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ And we ran out the door and the cops were having us go around the corner where there were no bullets or anything,” Rivera said.
Christopher Hansen
The Ohio native visited Pulse for the first time early Sunday morning. He recounted the gruesome scene to ABC News: The wounded were abundant, and Hansen just wanted to help.
“I’m not going to leave these victims behind [sic],” he told CNN’s New Day.
Hansen told ABC that he tried to help a man who was shot in the back. He does not know if the man, who did not speak English, survived.
Hansen, who had been at the club by himself, was making his way outside when he came across another victim who had been shot in the arm.
“I was with her trying to help her to control her breathing, ‘It’s OK, stay calm, just breathe,’ ” Hansen told ABC.
Samuel Maldonado
Maldonado and his partner were selling fritters at Pulse early Sunday morning when the shooting began. Upon hearing gunshots, the couple quickly hid under the table where they were shielded by a black linen tablecloth.
“We literally saw people just running, and then we saw this young lady in blood and she just collapsed,” he told HLN’s Mike Galanos.
Maldonado pulled the woman under the table with them when Mateen moved to the courtyard. She was still screaming when Mateen returned to shoot the wounded but she escaped to safety with Maldonado’s help when Mateen turned his back.
Josh McGill
McGill, a 26-year-old Orlando native, went to Pulse with co-workers from the nightclub’s sister bar, Southern Nights Orlando, according to the Los Angeles Times. Two hours after he arrived, gunshots broke out. Although McGill escaped unscathed, he encountered a man in the parking lot who had been shot three times and was losing blood at an alarming rate.
McGill, a nursing student, peeled off his shirt and, with the help of an unnamed bystander, tried to stop the bleeding and get the man to paramedics. But the wounded man’s state was deteriorating so quickly that the police officer who drove them to the hospital instructed McGill to lie on top of the man to slow the bleeding.
“I don’t know if you’re religious or not, but I’ll say a prayer with you,” McGill told the bleeding man, who said his name was Rodney.
The pair made it to the hospital and doctors began treating Rodney. His family told McGill that he would survive.
“Words cannot and will not describe the feeling of that. Being covered in blood,” McGill said in a Facebook post. “Trying to save a [guy’s] life that I don’t even know.”
The people who stood in line to give blood
Although there was a significant amount of anger directed at a decadeslong federal ban on sexually active gay men giving blood, Orlando-area residents flooded local blood banks on Sunday. OneBlood, which operates blood banks in Central Florida, said it had to turn away people for the time being.
“I’ve been here 13 years and never seen a response like this,” Pat Michaels, a spokesman for OneBlood, told the Orlando Sentinel.
“You want to do something to help,” Frank Tiffany, one of the many in line to give blood, told the Sentinel. “It’s hard to believe. … You have to do something to help. You can’t stay home.”
A OneBlood employee, Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, was killed in Sunday’s attack. Ayala-Ayala, a biologics assistant who had been recently promoted, was praised by co-workers as a “vibrant” person.
“He was very dedicated to his work and had very high expectations for his team because what we do is in service to patients, and he was very proud of that,” co-worker Kelly Gollert told People magazine. “But he was also a very supportive and loving person.”
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