“We know a similar horror,” says Pulse shooting survivor and gay activist Brandon Wolf.
For one Pulse nightclub shooting survivor, the admission by police Friday that they waited too long to go after a gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school brought back bitter memories of hiding in a bathroom while his best friends were being slaughtered.
Brandon Wolf managed to escape the June 12, 2016, massacre at the Orlando nightclub that claimed the lives of his friends Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero, and 47 others — one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history.
And just as police in Uvalde, Texas, now face harsh criticism for failing to storm the classroom at Robb Elementary School where the 18-year-old shooter was holed-up, Orlando law enforcement was faulted for giving mass killer Omar Mateen more time to murder more people.
Mateen, a disgruntled security guard and self-proclaimed “Islamic Soldier,” also wounded 53 people before he was killed in a police shootout. And just like the Texas shooter, he was armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.
“A total failure of police response in Uvalde cost children their lives,” Wolf, who works for Equality Florida, the state’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization, wrote in an email to NBC News. “We know a similar horror. While police waited three hours to breach Pulse Nightclub, 13 of our friends and family members died on the bathroom floor.”
Wolf said his community was failed six years ago just as the slain children in Uvalde were failed.
“The powerful in this country are addicted to the failing experiment of doubling down on the status quo knowing that it will lead to the same result,” he wrote. “These families deserved courage, not cowardice, on Tuesday from those they pay to protect and serve them. They deserve accountability, not simply belated press conference reflections. And they deserve political leaders who stop regurgitating the same old talking points and doubling down on easy access to guns while whole communities are shattered.”
Wolf weighed in after police admitted their response to the attack on the school was rife with mistakes, including by the on-scene commander, Peter Arredondo, who believed the shooter had barricaded himself in the classroom and assumed, wrongly and tragically, that no more children were at risk.
