At one point during the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Patience Carter prayed to die.
"I was just begging God to take my soul out of my body," the 20-year-old said Tuesday during a news conference at Orlando's Florida Hospital. Carter, in Orlando on vacation, hid with two friends inside a handicapped bathroom stall during the attack, and said at one point, shooter Omar Mateen asked, "Are there any black people in here?" Carter said she was too afraid to answer, but someone else said, "'Yes, there are about six or seven of us.' The gunman responded back to him saying that, 'You know, I don't have a problem with black people, this is about my country. You guys suffered enough.'"
Another survivor, Angel Santiago, 32, said he was crammed in a stall with up to 20 other people, and he could smell the gunpowder. They tried to be as quiet as possible to not attract attention, "but the gunfire kept getting closer and closer." Carter said she heard Mateen speak in a foreign language and place a call to 911. At one point, she said, it "sounded like he was communicating with other people involved in it," and he mentioned having "snipers outside." There was blood everywhere, and people inside the bathroom were calling and texting loved ones. Mateen kept yelling at them to turn their phones off, she said, but some kept ringing, "we were assuming because they were dead." When the ordeal was over, she discovered a bullet went through her right leg, shattering a bone, and entered her left leg. She says she now has survivor's guilt, and wrote a poem about it: "The guilt of feeling grateful to be alive is heavy. The other 49 who were not so lucky to feel this pain of mine."
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