Trapped in bathroom by Orlando gunman, she knew ‘he was not going to stop killing people until he was killed’
As Patience Carter and two friends cowered inside the handicapped bathroom stall, injured and pinned by a crush of bleeding bodies, the gunman who opened fire in the Pulse nightclub kept talking.
“He said, ‘Are there any black people in here?’ I was too afraid to answer,” said Carter, who is black.
Carter continued: “There was an African American man in the stall with us … he said, ‘Yes, there are about six or seven of us.’ The gunman responded back to him saying that, ‘you know, I don’t have a problem with black people, this is about my country. You guys suffered enough.’”
Carter, a slight 20-year-old with long hair and rhinestone-tipped nails, had just arrived in Orlando, Florida, for her first night of vacation and ended up cowering with more than a dozen people held hostage by the Omar Mateen in a rear bathroom. Carter and another survivor, Angel Santiago, 32, on Tuesday met with reporters at Florida Hospital in Orlando to recount their ordeal.
When Santiago heard shooting, he figured it was a fight, and took cover in a restroom. “I thought it was going to pass,” he said.
