After The Orlando Shootings, The Changed Lives Of Gay Latinos

is a grim kind of luck that the deadliest shooting in American history should have happened two blocks from a Level 1 trauma center. In the very early morning on Sunday, June 12th, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old Afghan-American, killed forty-nine people during Latin Night at Pulse, a gay night club in downtown Orlando. Most of the victims died at the scene, and nine almost immediately after arriving at Orlando Regional Medical Center, where the majority of the fifty-three wounded were treated. “I think we will see the death toll rise,” Michael Cheatham, the hospital’s chief surgical-quality officer, warned the press at 11 a.m. It did not, owing in part to the efforts of ordinary Orlandoans, who waited for up to eight hours in order to donate blood, and of doctors at Orlando Regional who, by Monday afternoon, had performed more than thirty surgeries. Within a few days, all but a few patients had been released.