The first message Mina Justice received from her son Sunday
morning seemed innocuous.
“Mommy I love you,” Eddie Justice texted at 2:06 a.m. The first message Mina Justice received from
her son Sunday
morning seemed strange
His next words, though, were chilling.
“In club,” he wrote. “They shooting.”
Worried and confused, Mina tried calling her son, but there
was no answer, she told the Associated Press. She texted him to ask whether he
was okay.
“Trapp in bathroom,” Eddie wrote a minute later. “Pulse.
Downtown. Call police.”
Mina didn’t know it yet, but her son was caught in the midst
of what would prove to be the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
At that instant, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old security guard,
was stalking Pulse, a popular Orlando gay club, with an assault rifle and
pistol. He would kill 50 people and wound at least 53 more before dying in a
shootout with police.
For 44 minutes, she sat in the dark, staring at her phone,
watching the attack unfold in increasingly terrified texts from her son.
Then the texts stopped.
Seconds earlier, Eddie Justice had again texted his mom.
“I’m gonna die,” he wrote.
She called 911.
Before the mass shooting made international headlines,
however, news of the incident spread on social media and in panicked texts from
people trapped inside the club.
“Everyone get out of pulse and keep running,” the club wrote
on its Facebook page at 2:09 a.m.
Gunman who killed 50 in Orlando nightclub had pledged
allegiance to ISIS
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