After Pulse: Michael Farmer

Posted on by Thor

Advisory: Please note that this post is about the Pulse nightclub massacre on June 12, 2016. It contains sensitive and difficult to read content.

Michael Farmer work up on June 12, 2016 to a group text message from the CEO of Equality Florida to make sure everyone was alright. The only detail in the text was that there was a shooting. When he got on social media the first thing to pop up on his news feed was live footage from a local news outlet of the scene outside of Pulse Nightclub. The first people in the frame were a friend J.P. Cortez and Drew Leinonen‘s mother. That is when the seriousness of the situation sank in.

Michael was in Sarasota at the time and immediately drove back to Orlando. Back in Orlando Sunday morning he had a conference call with Equality Florida staff. Not everyone got on the call, some were still sleeping. They debriefed and then they started thinking through what roll they could play moving forward to help. They aren’t a direct service agency so they set about to start fundraising. They started a go-fund-me campaign too try and raise $100,000. In the first day they raised over a million dollars. Ultimately 9.5 million dollars was raised. The fundraiser was linked to the email of one of the staff members and she needed to answer all of the questions. The LGBT community was familiar with their work but others were not aware of the organization. There was a lot of scrutiny. The Better Business Borough had to vet them.

They started becoming a clearing house for offerings from people, like someone called and offered bulk burial plots at a Methodist Cemetery. They needed to catalogue all that was being offered and connect with the people that needed it.

They partnered with the National Compassion Fund very early. They helped as the scope grew. The National Compassion Fund responds to the awful tragedies that keep happening in America, they set up fund for each of them. They insure that the victims get all of the money without administrative costs.

He and Ida Eskamani then drove to Jacksonville, because they had a sponsorship event scheduled at 4pm. Despite the chaos they felt a need to stick to the schedule. Once they got there he immediately realized it was a mistake. It was just a two hour event. But it turned into an incredibly emotional event.

There clearly was going to be a large vigil, and there were concerns about safety. The original plan was to hold the vigil at Lake Eola. The Mayor and Police Department didn’t feel that was a safe option. It was becoming a run away train. Equality Florida called the Mayor and tried to get in front of it. That is how the Dr. Phillips Center Vigil came into being. No one could have imagined to many people would show up to that vigil. All this happened in the first 48 hours.

After Pulse: David Thomas Moran

Posted on by Thor

Advisory: Please note that this post is about the Pulse nightclub massacre on June 12, 2016. It contains sensitive and difficult to read content. Post written with narrator’s consent.

David Thomas Moran co-founded Gays Against Guns in the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting. He participated in a sit-in for the 49 lives lost and was arrested.

David first became an activist in college. The Pulse hate crime and Donald Trump’s election made the stakes higher than ever for him. He feels marginalized people are being scapegoated and targeted for everything.

The day before the shooting at Pulse, a friend had returned to Orlando. He picked his friend up from the airport and his friend wanted to go out that Friday before the shooting, but David was tired and so stayed home. His friend went out and saw Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero at Southern Nights, another club in Orlando. That was the same night Christina Grimmie was murdered at the Plaza Live.

Saturday morning, David walked to Plaza Live to pay his respects to her. That night he had to work at the restaurant again. After work, he asked his friend if he wanted to go out to Southern Nights or Pulse. However their car battery kept dying. They struggled in the parking lot to jump the battery and by the time they got a charge they decided they were done for the night. They went home.

David didn’t sleep well that night. He noticed some vibrating. He got a text message that said, “there has been a mass shooting at Pulse.” What? He went to CNN and the top story was the shooting. It did not make sense. At the time the news said that 20 people had been killed. Searching Facebook he found a post from Brandon Wolf that said, “Eric and I were there, we got out.” If they were there then other friends might have been there. Drew might have been there. Are they OK? he started to message friends. He had already texted his family to let them know he was OK. When he reached Brandon Wolf he was told, “We got out but Juan has been shot and we don’t know where Drew is.” A friend sent a link to a news clip and it was of Drew’s mother. She was at the hospital trying to figure out where he was. David froze.

Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero had planned to have a pool party on June 12, 2016 and they had invited David. He was considering going. The whole day he kept thinking, this is just supposed to be a pool party. The news announced that Juan was one of the first three who was confirmed dead. Juan and Drew’s pictures were being plastered all over the media.

David decided to walk to The Center and he got there around 9AM, then spent the whole day there. He posted updates and let people know where they could donate blood. He managed several Facebook pages that addressed peoples’ needs. At the Center, everyone stood and listened as President Obama came on the TV. He said it was an act of hate and terror. Moran felt some were calling it a terrorist attack to justify militarizing the police and anti-immigrant legislation, all of which he feels does not honor the lived experiences of the people who were victimized by this act of violence.

He left the Center and biked to Ember. He had originally met Drew at Ember. It was hard. Everyone was crying and grieving. There was a candle light vigil. We still didn’t know at that point who had been lost. Nothing was 100% confirmed. David went to Drew’s wake and funeral.

Much later, after the Dallas police shootings, Ida Eskamani contacted him and told him there was going to be a sit-in on gun safety reforms. They wanted to address intersectional concerns around racism, wage inequality, anti-immigrant sentiment, and Islamophobia.  Though he had worked with OPD through Bike Walk Central Florida, and had a good experience with that, he was hesitant to participate in this sit-in. He got to the sit-in just in time to walk in with protestors at 10AM. When he was arrested, he only had the red hat and a red heart in his pocket that you see in the sketch above. He had nothing else. That experience made him aware of the solidarity awareness movement coalition in Orlando. Various organizations sat in solidarity. After most people left, he stayed behind to sit-in with Ida. The sit-in made him realize that he had the power to save himself. The sit-in was largely about politician Marco Rubio‘s inaction. Rubio was confronted by David the next week. The Pulse shooting targeted people he did nothing to help. He used their oppression as an excuse to run for office again. He did nothing for gun safety laws, he did nothing for LGBTQ+ equality, and did nothing to alleviate the oppression of workers across the state.  Rubio was the epitome of the exploitation of the Pulse hate crime. People saw that confrontation. The Advocate dropped the story and it received a lot of coverage. That is when Gays Against Guns reached out to David about starting an Orlando Chapter.

Noor Salman Testimony Continues

Posted on by Thor

 There is some sensitive content and disturbing details included
within. If you feel you may be affected, please do not read this post.

William Braniff took the stand in the Noor Salman case as a terrorist expert. He is the Executive Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and a Professor of the Practice at the University of Maryland. In general he took the stand to outline Omar Mateen‘s obsession with ISIS and to describe the violent online videos that call for violence in the west during Ramadan. On cross examination Charles Swift portrayed Omar Mateen as a lone wolf and he said that a partner would never offer aid unless they were converted to the ideological extremist views of their partner. William disagreed. In research papers it has been found that love can be a reason that a couple might work together for an extremist cause. The example was brought up of the Boston Bombers. One brother was the extremist and the other simply followed to stay close to his brothers views. Mateen had researched the Boston Bombers and he considered them comrades-in-arms.

Nelson Rodriguez took the stand to describe his night at the Pulse Nightclub. On June 11, 2016, he was a Florida highway patrolman who went to Pulse with friend Christopher SanFeliz to celebrate his graduation from
police academy and connected with other friends, including Shane Tomlinson. Another friend Amanda showed up late that night. Immediately after
last call, he heard shots ring out and the friends got separated. “It was dark,” he
testified, “and I thought I was going to die that night. I just thank
the heavenly father.”  Nelson dropped to the floor and crawled for cover.

The gunman paused his shooting and Nelson realized that he was reloading. it was time to move or die. He crawled towards the front entrance, but the gunman was blocking the exit. he changed his tack and crawled instead to the patio where people escaped over a fence. 

Once clear of the club, he called 911 and offered a description of the gunman to police. He got a call from his friend Amanda who was trapped inside the bathroom with the gunman during the three hour siege. After the gunman was shot Nelson began calling hospitals looking for Amanda. She had been shot multiple times, but survived. He could find no news of Christopher Sanfeliz or Shane Tomlinson and later learned that they had both died.

Officer Tyler Olson was an Orlando Police
Department officer working extra duty the night of the Pulse shooting. He took the stand to further clarify the police response after the shooting by Omar Mateen at the Pulse Nightclub.

When Tyler arrived at the scene, he said he tried to enter the back of the club, but
there was no entrance.

When he went around to enter from the front, he described that there
were a large amount of people on the ground and said he didn’t know the
number of shooters at that point.

Police body camera video showed Olson carrying a victim to his truck. The woman screamed in agony when lifted into the truck and then screamed even louder when she had to be removed from the truck, presumably at the hospital. He got choked up describing the scene. This happened with nearly every officer that took the stand.

Outside the courtroom Christine Leinonen the mother of Drew Leinonen shouted her blame into a microphone for officers who testified. Their tears offer no comfort. Instead she blamed them for not saving her son that night.