One of the first officers inside Orlando's Pulse nightclub speaks out
One of the first police officers to respond to the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., says he and other officers who forced their way into the club held their position for “15 or 20 minutes [or] longer” while the gunman was holed up in a bathroom with hostages before the SWAT team arrived and told the officers to retreat.
Nearly three hours passed before the SWAT team successfully breached the wall of the club with an armored vehicle, engaged the gunman in a shootout, and killed him, putting to an end the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Brandon Cornwell, a 25-year-old officer from Belle Isle, Fla., told the Washington Post that he was among five or six officers to arrive on scene shortly after 2 a.m. According to authorities, an off-duty policeman working just outside the front door “engaged” the shooter, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, near the club’s entrance before running back inside.
“Some [officers] ran towards the building; some stayed back with people running out,” Cornwell said, according to the paper. “There was tons of people running out of the club. I grabbed my assault rifle and ran toward the club. At this point, the shooter is still actively shooting inside.”
The responding officers then broke a large glass window and entered Pulse.
“There happens to be an [Orlando Police Department] lieutenant commander who was there, and he says, ‘We’ve got to go in,’” Cornwell said. “No one disagreed. One of the officers busted out one of those side windows, and we just went in and went from there.”
Once inside, the officers were “trying to locate exactly where the shooter was,” Cornwell said. “We kept hearing people scream and shots fired.”
Mateen opened fire inside the gay nightclub just after last call, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others.
After they realized Mateen had barricaded himself in the bathroom, Cornwell and the other officers “took up a tactical position by the bar,” aiming their assault rifles toward the bathroom door. According to Cornwell, they were told to hold their position by the lieutenant in command.
Cornwell said he never saw Mateen — and never fired his weapon.
More from the Post’s report:
Minutes passed as he kept aiming toward the bathroom, he said. He could hear screams. There were people lying all over the floor of the club. He kept aiming, waiting for SWAT. More screaming. He and the other officers held their position, focused on the bathroom, where he could see “some movement inside,” he said.
The Post asked Cornwell whether he felt an urge to pursue the shooter.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he replied. “I was following the lieutenant’s command.”
“We just basically stayed there, waited for movement, and we just held our position until SWAT got there,” Cornwell said. “Once SWAT got there, they told us to retreat, that they’d take over because we were not really in tactical gear — we were just in our police uniforms.”
According to an earlier report by the Orlando Sentinel, Cornwell was stationed inside the club “for about a half hour until he was relieved by SWAT officers.”
Cornwell’s account of the police response in the opening minutes of the attack — one of the first to be made public — raises questions about the timeline the FBI and other officials have provided in the days following the massacre.
Yahoo News and other media outlets have requested police reports about the shooting, but have so far been denied access.
On Monday, the FBI released partial transcripts of Mateen’s 911 calls from inside the club as well as a timeline of the events that occurred in the wee hours of June 12:
2:02 a.m.: OPD call transmitted multiple shots fired at Pulse nightclub.
2:04 a.m.: Additional OPD officers arrived on scene.
2:08 a.m.: Officers from various law enforcement agencies made entrance to Pulse and engaged the shooter.
2:18 a.m.: OPD S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons & Tactics) initiated a full call-out.
4:21 a.m.: OPD pulled an air conditioning unit out of a Pulse dressing room window for victims to evacuate.
While the FBI will not be releasing transcripts of OPD communication with victims, significant information obtained from those victims allowed OPD to gain knowledge of the situation inside Pulse.
4:29 a.m.: As victims were being rescued, they told OPD the shooter said he was going to put four vests with bombs on victims within 15 minutes.
An immediate search of the shooter’s vehicle on scene and inside Pulse ultimately revealed no vest or improvised explosive device.
5:02 a.m.: OPD SWAT and OCSO Hazardous Device Team began to breach wall with explosive charge and armored vehicle to make entrance.
5:14 a.m.: OPD radio communication stated that shots werefred.
5:15 a.m.: OPD radio communication stated that OPD engaged the suspect and the suspect was reported down.
Based on OPD radio communications, there were no reports of shots being fired inside Pulse between the initial exchange of gunfire between responding officers and shooter, and the time of the final breach. During this time, the shooter communicated with an OPD 677 operator and an OPD crisis negotiator, and OPD radio communications reported that victims were being rescued.
Last week, Mark Canty, the Orlando Police Department’s SWAT commander, defended the decision to wait nearly three hours after the initial shooting before breaching the club’s wall.
“Initially it was an active shooter,” Canty told Yahoo News on Thursday. “Once the shooting stopped, it became a barricaded gunman. And our officers acted accordingly — they surrounded it, they contained it, and we looked for ways to get the hostages out.”
“As the SWAT team arrived, we were developing a plan, and as we were developing that plan, we were learning there were more people inside,” Canty continued. “We were acting as quickly as we could. From the beginning of the incident, officers were rescuing people. And I will tell you that the SWAT officers, the patrol officers, they did everything they could to rescue as many people as they could.”
But several experts have said the delay may have contributed to the death toll.
“Action beats inaction 100 percent of the time,” Chris Grollnek, an active-shooter expert and a retired police officer and SWAT team member, told the Associated Press. “When we see SWAT teams respond and not making entry [it] creates victims. Period. End of story.”
But Canty said both SWAT and patrol officers pulled “several” people out of the club during the three-hour standoff.
“It’s a kind of misnomer that we weren’t in the building,” Canty said. “We had officers in the building from the beginning. And from the onset, they were pulling people out of the club.”
