Messages from inside club depict three hours of horror: ‘Everyone get out of Pulse and keep running’ ... ‘he’s coming. I’m gonna die’ ... ‘losing blood, love u all’

It was 2 am, closing time at Pulse. Last call had come and gone. Saturday night had become Sunday morning. But the dance floor remained crowded, with hundreds of sweaty men and women packed into Orlando’s most popular gay nightclub, a low-slung building at the corner of West Esther Street and South Orange Avenue.

“Reggaeton - Bachata - Merengue - Salsa” an advertisement on Pulse’s Twitter account had promised. This was “Latin Night.”

The club’s DJ, Ray Rivera, suddenly heard a sound, a pop-pop-pop. Firecrackers? He lowered the music and then heard it again. This was gunfire.

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“I turned the music off and basically everyone was just running out,” he told the Orlando Sentinel. “It was just complete chaos.” He took cover behind the DJ booth. Several patrons joined him, everyone staying low. When there was a pause in the shooting - maybe the killer was reloading - Rivera said, “Come on, let’s go!,” and he and the others fled through a rear exit.

One of the club patrons, Chris Hansen, who’d just moved to Florida a couple of months earlier, thought the popping sound was part of the music. “It went with the beat almost,” he said later.