Orlando, Fla. (NBC News) — Wounded survivors of the Pulse massacre are offering first hand accounts of the terror they experienced inside the nightclub.
“Bullets started going through the stall wall towards us. I was on the ground in a pool of blood…I wasn’t sure whose it was,” Angel Santiago said from his hospital bed Tuesday.
Santiago and Patience Carter were shot, then held at gunpoint by Omar Mateen.
“We got trapped in there,” Carter said. “The gunman entered the bathroom and was shooting his machine gun, so, we’re all like scrambling around in the bathroom, screaming at the top of our lungs.”
Carter says Mateen was calm and deliberate during the attack.
“I never thought in a million years that my eyes could witness something so tragic,” she said.
Investigators say Mateen’s current wife, Noor Zahi Salman, tried to talk him out of carrying out the attack.
NBC News has also learned she was with him when he bought ammunition and a holster, and drove him to the pulse night club weeks before the killing spree. Police are still investigating her role, and say charges may be forthcoming.
The FBI is also taking a serious and much closer look at reports from those in Orlando’s gay community claiming that mateen had been seen in gay night clubs, including Pulse, for years and that he often communicated with gay men online.
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