Homicidal club shooter Omar Mateen had an apparent soft spot — for black people.
As he holed up for hours with hostages amid the carnage in a bloody bathroom of the Orlando nightclub he was terrorizing, Mateen asked terrified, wounded patrons if any of them were black.
“I don’t have a problem with black people,” Mateen said, according to survivor Patience Carter, 20. “This is about my country. You guys suffered enough.”
Still, the suffering, even for the club’s black people, did not end. Before the gun smoke cleared, there were dozens of people dead and dozens of others wounded. At least a half-dozen of the murdered patrons were black.
One man, on the ground and already wounded, dodged death after the gun-toting terrorist missed at point-blank range — shooting him in the hand instead of his head during the slaughter in Florida.
“I’m thinking I’m next,” Angel Colon, 26, told reporters on Tuesday. “I’m dead.”
Carter recalled being trapped in a bathroom stall at Pulse, a gay club that was packed with about 320 patrons when the killer invaded. She told reporters a fellow hostage shielded her from gunfire, likely saving her life.
“We went from having the time of our lives to the worst night of our lives in a matter of minutes,” said Carter, who was wracked with guilt because she survived. Colon and Carter made it out alive.
Officially, 49 people were killed by Mateen in the massacre that began around 2 a.m. Sunday. Another 53 were wounded. Six remained in critical condition Tuesday. Officials say some of the gravely wounded may die.
The stories of Colon and Carter, who were recovering from gunshot wounds at Orlando hospitals, provided a terrifying glimpse of the carnage.
Both said “Latin Night” at Pulse began as a great evening out. Colon, of Orlando, was finishing his drink and saying goodbye to friends.
Carter, of Philadelphia, had just arrived in town a day earlier and was having fun with two pals. They’d just called an Uber to head home.
Then the horror began. Mateen shot Colon in the leg and he fell to the ground.
“I tried to get back up, but everyone started running everywhere. I got trampled over,” he said.
Carter, meanwhile, made the fateful decision with her friend, Tiara Parker, to reenter the club after fleeing and search for another friend, Akyra Murray.
Colon lay on the floor, watching in horror as Mateen began “making sure everyone is dead.” “I look over and he shoots the girl next to me,” Colon said. “I’m thinking, I’m next, I’m dead. … By the glory of God he shoots toward my head and hits my hand. Then he shoots and hits my hip.”
Colon did his best to not react to being shot, hoping to fool Mateen into thinking he was already dead. Then, Mateen got into a gunfight with a cop near the entrance to the club.
During the battle, another officer managed to slip into the club and drag Colon to safety.
Carter’s horror was far from over. The intern for Fox 29 local news in Philadelphia ran with her two friends into a handicap bathroom stall packed with terrified clubgoers. Mateen blasted the stall. Carter was covered in blood and debris. Screams mixed with the constant ringing of cell phones.
“People are getting hit by bullets. Blood is everywhere,” she said.
There were lulls in the violence, chilling moments when Mateen calmly spoke with people in the bathroom. He also talked to a 911 operator and pledged allegiance to ISIS, Carter recalled.
Mateen, a U.S. citizen whose parents are from Afghanistan, said he’d committed the atrocity to stop U.S. bombing of “his country,” Carter said.
The 911 calls came around 2:20 a.m., according to reports. Carter would remain in the stall for nearly three more hours. During a tense interval without gunfire, Carter realized she’d been shot in the leg. Her two friends had also been hit.
“This wasn’t a game. This was really real,” she said. “He wasn’t going to stop killing people until he was killed.”
Around 5 a.m., police set off explosions to distract the gunman as they used an armored vehicle to ram into the bathroom where Carter and others were waiting.
Mateen backed into the stall filled with wounded people as cops closed in.
“Hey, you!” he shouted before shooting one person on the ground, Carter said. The second person he shot should have been Carter, but another hostage rolled on top of her, she said.
“I don’t know who that person is … Thank you for saving my life,” she said.
She doesn’t know if that person survived.
Cops then shot Mateen, and rescued Carter, who was lying in “piles of bloody water” that had flooded the bathroom, she said.
Her 18-year-old friend, Murray, was killed. She was the youngest to die.
Carter was filled with survivor’s guilt — the subject of a moving poem she wrote that opened: “The guilt of feeling grateful to be alive is heavy.”