Only seven victims of the Pulse nightclub attack remained in hospital in Orlando on Wednesday, authorities said, one day after police and fire officials released hundreds of pages of documents that chronicled the horror of the 12 June mass shooting that left 49 dead.
Florida Hospital, one of the downtown facilities that admitted the 53 people who were wounded in gunman Omar Mateen’s deadly rampage, announced it had released the last of its 12 patients on Tuesday after two and a half weeks of treatment.
At the Orlando Regional Medical Center, closer to the scene of the shooting, five of the remaining patients were in stable condition on Wednesday, one in “guarded” condition and the seventh critical, hospital managers said. Surgeons said they completed their 63rd operation on one of the victims on Tuesday.
“Overall the patients are doing well,” trauma surgeon Michael Cheatham said.
“Now it’s mostly minor issues, wound closures, nothing that is life threatening at this time.”
The documents released on Tuesday, meanwhile, provide a glimpse of the three hours of chaos inside the gay nightclub through 911 call logs and police radio transmissions, starting at 2.02am, moments after Mateen entered the club and began shooting with an assault rifle and handgun.
The records, compiled by emergency dispatchers, reveal brief snippets of what terrified clubgoers were hearing and seeing around them as the shooting continued, including reports of people trapped in a toilet cubicle hearing the gunshots getting louder as the shooter approached.
In all, almost 600 pages were released, many of them fire department or code enforcement inspection records of the nightclub building stretching back decades. Both the fire department and attorneys for Pulse on Tuesday denied a suggestion in the records that one of the club’s six exit doors might have been blocked, claiming there were no safety concerns or violations.
But it is the 125 pages of Orlando police department (OPD) records that provide a detailed timeline of the unfolding horror, including calls from people describing the severity of the wounds they had suffered or witnessed.
The first entry on OPD’s “incident narrative” comes six seconds before 2.03am on 12 June with a report of “shots fired” at Pulse. The first 911 call comes less than a minute later from a male inside the club who reported he was “hiding upstairs” with five others while shooting was still going on.
The dispatchers, having already been advised of “multiple down”, recorded that they could hear shots in the background on open lines with clubgoers, and a female caller at 2.05am says she is hiding in a closet.
The records continue in a similar vein for several minutes, with a number of reports of callers screaming. At 2.09am a dispatcher reports: “My caller is no longer responding, just an open line with moaning.”
Some of the callers gave information that later turned out to have been inaccurate. At 2.13am the log records one caller advising “that it is a lot of people shooting” and another at 2.52am reports the shooter had “several bombs strapped to him”. It was later established that Mateen carried out the attack alone and had no explosives.
The final report of shots being fired comes at 2.18am, but for the next three hours, until the OPD breached a rear wall of the club with an armoured vehicle and ended the siege by killing Mateen, the calls continued.
Some of the 911 calls were from parents who had heard from their children inside the club. One father called to report his daughter “was hiding in the bathroom and was shot in the leg and arm”. Others reported severe gunshot wounds and victims losing blood, while operational reports detail how some of those who were injured in the early stages but who managed to escape were being transported to local hospitals.
The calls also show how it became clear to club patrons that Mateen was a terrorist. Some heard his own 911 calls in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and said there was a bomb in his car outside, another claim which proved not to be true.
At 5.07am, the log records four explosions followed by “shots fired north bathroom” as Mateen was taken down by OPD marksmen after a Swat team entered the building. The end of the terror is recorded simply at 5.17am with the words: “Bad guy down.”
Earlier this week authorities released redacted transcripts of 911 calls the gunman made during the assault.
Orlando city officials made no comment as they released the documents. The FBI said on Tuesday that “our investigation is ongoing” and that there was no new information to release.
