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Anguish in Orlando as Families Wait for Updates on Shooting Victims The 49 Lives Lost to Horror in Orlando: Mostly Young and Mostly Latino
(about 7 hours later)
For hour after hour, anguished relatives paced on Sunday outside a hotel near Orlando Regional Medical Center, waiting for word. They ate potato chips and sipped water. They listened to hospital workers explain how victims of the attack on a gay nightclub would be given anonymous identifications until the slow process of collecting their real names came to a close. ORLANDO, Fla. — Louis Omar Ocasio-Capo was 20, worked at a Starbucks in a Target store, and lived to dance. Stanley Almodovar III, a 23-year-old pharmacy technician, had posted a Snapchat video of himself singing and laughing on his way to the Pulse nightclub on Saturday. Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36, nicknamed Shaki, had been married to his husband for about a year, worked at a Party City and a Sunglasses Hut, and was entranced by interior design.
Around 6 p.m. Sunday, 16 hours after a gunman stormed Pulse, the popular club, and sprayed bullets into the crowd, a hospital worker walked into the lobby of the hotel, Hampton Inn & Suites, with a list that ended the waiting for some. The worker announced names, one by one: clubgoers who had been released, those in critical condition and patients being treated at a different hospital nearby. The dead were mostly young, mostly Latino and mostly gay — though some were none of those and a fair number were straight men and women enjoying an evening of Latin music. And on Monday, when their names were read aloud in the auditorium of a red-brick senior center, the worst fears of their families came true as the roster of the victims of the Orlando attack became horribly real.
Names of some clubgoers, like that of Juan P. Rivera, 37, were never called. His brother, Baron Serrano, held onto hope in the face of dwindling odds. He had been waiting outside the hospital for nine hours. Juan Ramon Guerrero was less than a month shy of his 23rdbirthday and in his third year at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He was quiet and kind, his uncle Robert Guerrero, 51, recalled. Like other members of his Dominican family, he liked Latin music, which is why he went to Pulse on Saturday night.
“It is very hard to deal with this,” Mr. Serrano said, “and the worse pain is the pain of being here without knowing what happened to him.” “He was not a party boy,” Mr. Guerrero said. The family found out that Juan had been hurt when someone saw him being carried out of the club and into an ambulance. Family members began a frantic search. Finally, a hospital confirmed the awful news. The bereft uncle, like so many other relatives, turned to Facebook to pour out his rage.
By Monday morning, 48 of the 49 dead had been identified by the medical examiner, the Orlando mayor, Buddy Dyer, said at a news conference. Of those, 46 were placed on the city’s official tally, indicating that their relatives had been notified. (The 50th dead person was the gunman.) “Once again the tentacles of death have touched our family, this time at the hands of a coward, a scoundrel, a disgusting human being without any scruples,” he wrote.
On Monday, relatives returned hoping for news. Esmeralda Leal and Julissa Leal came Monday to find news on Frank Hernandez, 27. Cesar Flores, who moved to the United States from Guatemala in 1984 to chase what he called the American dream, learned around 1 a.m. Monday that his only daughter, Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26, had died in the club along with a girlfriend, Amanda Alvear, 25.
“I have faith that he is all right,” Mr. Hernandez’s mother, Esmeralda said in Spanish. “I’m hoping that even if he’s in grave condition, that he’s alive.” “She was my best, my only girl,” Mr. Flores, who has two sons, said quietly, with evident grief, outside the Beardall Senior Center, where he was to receive help with arrangements to receive his daughter’s body for burial. “She was a happy girl all the time, but now she’s gone.”
“He’s just the best,” she said, “a hard worker, very positive, very happy. He never got into any trouble.” The attacker, Mr. Flores said, should be forgiven. “I cannot hang on to that hate,” he said. “It’s not weapons that kill — it’s the heart. That kind of hate is in the blood.”
His family found out he had been in the club from his boyfriend, from whom he became separated. As he spoke, two people nearby hugged each other for a long time and sobbed. From the front door of the building, a procession of relatives and friends emerged after the briefing, heads bowed. Each family was surrounded by a team of church volunteers in bright T-shirts, their hands linked to protect their charges from reporters’ questions.
“I was hoping he hadn’t been there,” Julissa Leal said, referring to the nightclub. “I wish I could see him. I will see him,” she went on, tears welling in her eyes. One woman, Eileen Villega, said the name of a family friend who had been in the nightclub, Angel L. Candelario-Padro, 27, had not appeared on any of the lists of dead or injured. “His boyfriend is in the hospital, but he doesn’t appear anywhere,” she said. Later, after she had left, his name was indeed found listed among the dead.
On Monday, Orlando Health said that 29 people remained in the hospital, six of those were undergoing surgery. Five patients were listed in grave condition. In all, the hospital said, it had treated 44 victims, six of whom had been discharged and nine who died. Orlando is a city that cannot be divorced from its tourist attractions, among them Disney World and Universal Studios, where some of the victims were employed. Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35, was the father of a young son and worked at DisneyLive!, according to his Facebook page. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that he had danced in the Atlanta Bachata Fest, a celebration of Latin dance and music.
The victims had been drawn to Pulse for an array of happy occasions: friends’ birthdays, a coming wedding, a chance to dance to salsa. Many of them were in their early 20s or 30s, with connections to the Caribbean or Central America. Some had come to Orlando looking for the embrace of a tolerant community. Luis S. Vielma, 22, worked on a Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios, and was mourned on Twitter by the author J.K. Rowling. He was also an emergency medical student at Seminole State College, whose president, E. Ann McGee, was among several college presidents who found themselves issuing statements of sorrow on Monday, a testimony to the youth lost in the rampage.
By Sunday, the city was a different place, with hospitals on lockdown and vigils being canceled because police resources were stretched too thin. “We are saddened by the tragic events this weekend, and the loss of one of our own,” Dr. McGee said.
But wherever they waited, relatives remembered the missing and dead. Shane Evan Tomlinson, who often sang with his band, Frequency, at Orlando’s Blue Martini nightclub, performed just hours before he was killed. Friends and fellow singers struggled to process the news of a charismatic life cut short.
Mr. Serrano recalled how his brother, Mr. Rivera, and brother-in-law, Luis Conde, had gotten off to a bumpy start in their relationship 13 years ago. They stuck together, and were at Pulse on Saturday night to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Mr. Serrano’s eyes lit up when he described what good care the couple, both bodybuilders, took of their physiques. “We’re all really feeling that numbness right now, and just the shock,” said Deejay Young, who met Mr. Tomlinson in a gospel show at Epcot. “It could have been any one of us.”
Like many, he was frustrated not to know whether his brother was alive. Jerald Arthur Wright, 31, was one of those Disney World cast members who seemed to never run out of energy for helping guests, and who, as a Spanish-speaking man whose family was from Colombia, forged a particularly close bond with Latin American visitors.
“I cannot understand why they can’t tell me anything because my brother is a very well-known person here in Orlando,” Mr. Serrano said. “He is a hairstylist and everybody knows him.” He was also straight, two friends who worked with Mr. Wright said. He had gone to Pulse on Saturday night to celebrate the birthday of a friend, Cory James Connell, 21, who was also killed.
Christine Leinonen, 58, had trouble sleeping on Saturday night. She was worried about a recent medical diagnosis. Restless, she woke up at 3 a.m. and checked her Facebook page. “It’s a great atmosphere,” said Jessica Weyl, 23, a friend who is also straight and goes to Pulse occasionally. “People aren’t judgmental. People aren’t feeling the need necessarily to impress each other.”
It was then that she noticed that a friend of her son’s, Brandon Wolf, had posted on the site about a shooting at Pulse. Ms. Leinonen wondered whether her son, Christopher, who was known to friends as Drew, had gone to the nightclub with his boyfriend, Juan Ramon Guerrero. She added, “At Pulse it’s just calm, cool, and collected. No one felt pressure to be anyone they weren’t. I’m straight and I love going there. My brother is gay and he loves going there.”
The answer came in a text message from Mr. Wolf: “Yes.” Ms. Weyl had just finished training for a job in Tomorrowland when she met Mr. Wright.
They agreed to meet at a 7-Eleven convenience store, where Mr. Wolf described seeing Mr. Guerrero, 22, being carried out of the nightclub, his body riddled with gunshot wounds. Mr. Guerrero was later pronounced dead. Mr. Leinonen’s name had not been added to the city’s list of victims by Sunday night, but his mother feared that he had met the same fate. “He took me under his wing and kind of showed me everything,” she said. She turned to him for questions about Disney policies, but especially when she encountered a guest who spoke Spanish. “He really connected with a lot of guests — we do have a lot of South Americans come,” she said. “He connected especially to those people.”
Ms. Leinonen and her son had moved to Orlando from Detroit when he was young because she worried that Mr. Leinonen, who is half-Japanese and half-white, would experience racism in Detroit. In 2003, he graduated from Seminole High School, where he had formed the school’s first gay-straight alliance. The accomplishment earned him an Anne Frank Humanitarian Award. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry confirmed Monday that three Mexicans were among the dead. The Mexican Consulate in Orlando was working to determine if a fourth victim was of Mexican origin.
He was a film and television buff. His mother had bought him a Darth Vader cake for his birthday on June 1. Mr. Leinonen had recently gone to work for an insurance company. They felt safe in the Orlando area. President Enrique Peña Nieto said the tragedy’s origins lay in “expressions of hatred, of discrimination, of phobia against certain people.”
“In this community, we have never experienced any racism,” Ms. Leinonen said. Many Latinos in Orlando are of Puerto Rican descent. Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34, was among them. He was proud of his heritage, and had made it his life’s mission to open doors for gay travelers, especially in Latin America. As the national brand manager for ALandCHUCK.travel, an agency that caters to gay people, he organized what the company’s owner, Al Ferguson, called the first-ever gay cruise to Cuba. “He fell in love with Cuba,” Mr. Ferguson said.
He had met Mr. Guerrero at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where Mr. Guerrero was a committed student in his third year, said his uncle, Robert Guerrero, 51, who also lives in Orlando. During the trip, in April, Mr. Sotomayor and Mr. Ferguson met with Mariela Castro, Raúl Castro’s daughter and a prominent gay rights activist there. The two men also posed in front of a poster left over from President Obama’s recent trip.
“A very kind human being,” Mr. Guerrero said. “A wonderful son. He didn’t deserve none of this.” On Sunday morning at Pulse, Mr. Sotomayor’s boyfriend of about three years had gone outside to put some things in his car when the shots broke out. Mr. Sotomayor texted him that he was hiding, but safe, and told him not to come back inside, Mr. Ferguson said. About 25 minutes later, he texted his boyfriend again, saying he was still hiding. That was the last message the boyfriend got.
He said his nephew, like other members of his Dominican family, liked Latin music, which was playing on Saturday night at Pulse. But Mr. Guerrero said his nephew’s true nature was to be quiet. Mr. Ferguson said the boyfriend’s parents, who live in Mexico, do not know he is gay.
The uncle expressed anger in a Facebook post: “Once again the tentacles of death have touched our family, this time at the hands of a coward, a scoundrel, a disgusting human being without any scruples.” “It’s a double catastrophe,” he said. “You face such horrible loss and then can’t share it.”
Many relatives were reeling on Sunday night from the frantic search.
Orlando Gonzalez said he had gotten a call on Sunday morning from the husband of his cousin, Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36. “He was hysterical trying to find him,” said Mr. Gonzalez, 26.
Mr. Ortiz-Rivera, nicknamed Shaki, had been married to his husband for about a year. He worked at a Party City and a Sunglass Hut store, and had a passion for hairstyling and interior design.
Family members called his phone over and over early Sunday, but got no answer. At a gathering place for families of the missing, a doctor finally pulled aside Mr. Gonzalez’s mother.
Mr. Gonzalez said, “They confirmed that he had passed.”
•
The victims identified so far by the City of Orlando:
Oscar A Aracena-Montero, 26
Stanley Almodovar III, 23
Amanda Alvear, 25
Darryl Roman Burt II, 29
Juan Chevez-Martinez, 25
Luis Daniel Conde, 39
Cory James Connell, 21
Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25
Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32
Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, 22
Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez, 31
Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25
Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26
Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22
Miguel Angel Honorato, 30
Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30
Javier Jorge-Reyes, 40
Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19
Anthony Luis Laureanodisla, 25
Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21
Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, 25
Kimberly Morris, 37
Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, 20
Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36
Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32
Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35
Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25
Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, 37
Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35
Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34
Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33
Martin Benitez Torres, 33
Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, 50
Luis S. Vielma, 22
Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37
Jerald Arthur Wright, 31
Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega, 24
Jean C. Nives Rodriguez, 27
Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, 33
Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, 49
Yilmary Rodriguez Sulivan, 24
Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32
Angel L. Candelario-Padro, 28
Frank Hernandez, 27
Paul Terrell Henry, 41
Antonio Davon Brown, 29