Patrons trapped in Pulse nightclub during Orlando shooting spree begged for help, dispatch records show

For 25 minutes, an 18-year-old woman, trapped in a bathroom at the Pulse nightclub, talked to an Orange County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher. She was wounded, afraid and going numb, she said.

She first lost feeling in her left arm, where she had been shot, she reported, then, a few minutes later, at 2.34am, she said she could no longer feel her left leg. Two minutes later, she said she was going blind. She “just keeps pleading” for a rescue, a dispatcher reported at 2.37am. “She does not want to die.”

Then, at 2.45am the phone line went dead. When a dispatcher tried to call her back three minutes later, no one picked up.

That woman’s story is in 35 pages of dispatch records released on Thursday by the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. They give a minute-by-minute account of what dispatchers at that agency heard and reported during the mass shooting two weeks ago.

They were released two days after the Orlando Police Department released a transcript of its dispatch traffic during and after the stand-off.

Forty-nine people were killed and more than 50 others were injured after a 29-year-old Fort Pierce security guard, Omar Mateen, entered the club with an assault rifle and 9mm handgun and opened fire at 2am on June 12.