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“I played dead, thinking that if I kept moving, he’d finish me off. “As I fell, I think he was aiming for my head, but he shot me in the spine,” Cufiño Rodriguez said.
Instead he shot him in the right leg and the left knee. And that’s when he shot me in the arm.”Ĭufiño Rodriguez begged the gunman to stop. When he got really close, I stretched out my right hand, to try to take his gun. Cufiño Rodriguez stayed on his feet, “waiting for the guy until he was on top of me. Everyone was running, screaming … The lights went out,” he said.
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I thought it might be the police or something. “In that moment, I had no idea what was happening. While it’s plain the memories are painful to disgorge, Cufiño Rodriguez, 31, leans forward in his wheelchair as he shares them, to be sure his listener understands: It was a war, with ferocious sudden violence and chaos. Cufiño Rodriguez, who’d gone to Pulse with friends while on vacation from his native Colombia, will. Reyes, like some survivors, doesn’t want to talk about that night. She’s also grown close to some fellow survivors, including Juan Jose Cufiño Rodriguez. She’s not only walking she’s dancing and hopes to start playing softball again soon. But so far, it’s two steps forward for every step back, she said. "I still have my days when I wake up in the middle of the night and I start crying, and I start thinking 'Why?' and I start sweating," Reyes said. Though Reyes, who once worked in a doctor’s office, has found unexpected wells of faith and support, there are difficult days. Those injuries pale against the vivid trauma of that night, and the grief Reyes, 30, carries for her three friends who didn’t survive.
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Yet the loss of that little finger is minor, she said, compared to her shattered shoulder blade and the damage done by the nine bullets that hit her, fragments now part of her body forever. Talk to Ilka Reyes about healing, and she blinks back tears as she looks at the place her right pinkie used to be. The massacre challenged the way law enforcement and emergency workers think about their response to such situations. The 49 victims, mostly young, gay, and Hispanic, became rallying points for activists seeking to advance social changes: gun control, mental healthcare and LGBTQ rights. But it has left other, lasting marks on Orlando's metro area of 2.3 million, and the world beyond. Pain, physical and emotional, is the most obvious legacy of the shooting. Friends and families of the dead are struggling to cope with empty seats at holiday tables. Survivors are recovering from the terror, learning to live with lingering injuries and paralyzed limbs, while finding the courage to re-enter society. “We are still reeling from it … we’re still healing here.”Ī year later, the legacy of the Pulse attack is still unfolding. “What I want the world to know is Orlando is still healing, and the families and survivors here have not moved on,” said Barbara Poma, Pulse’s owner, who now heads a foundation to help those impacted by the shooting. The seismic effects of that early morning rampage continue to shake the dead’s loved ones, the 53 others wounded in the attack and everyone else touched by the emotional and physical aftershocks. He plans to spend several hours Monday in the cemetery, praying over the grave of his son. It’s going to be a year, but it’s as if it just happened,” Honorato, 53, said in Spanish. “I thought that with time, the pain would go away, but no, no - the more the months pass, the more I feel it. It was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. He opened fire, methodically shooting down patrons one by one on the dance floor and in the bathrooms until police killed him. Miguel Honorato was one of 49 people shot to death on June 12, 2016, when an ISIS-inspired gunman stormed into Pulse, an Orlando gay nightclub. Monday marks 365 days since the killing of his son, Miguel, a 30-year-old married father of three who helped grow his immigrant family’s roadside taco business into a string of Central Florida Mexican groceries. A year nearly gone, and his heart is every bit as broken as it was on that day. ORLANDO - This is not an anniversary, Alex Honorato now knows.