As the June 12 anniversary of the massacre that claimed the lives of 49 people approached, PEOPLE spoke to survivors and loved ones of those lost. "There's not a year that goes by that I don't ask myself why it had to be them and not me," says one.
Credit: courtesy of Josean Garcia
NEED TO KNOW
- On June 12, 2016, shortly after 2 a.m., a man opened fire at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others
- At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history
- Ten years later, survivors and loved ones of those who were killed in the massacre share with PEOPLE how the attack continues to shape their lives and how they are honoring the victims’ legacies
Even before 2016, June had already become a difficult month for Mayra Alvear.
Her son, Nelson, who was born on June 7, 1988, died of osteosarcoma, a rare and aggressive bone cancer, on April 24, 2001, at age 12.
"There are certain days that your body recognizes automatically," Alvear says. "April 24 being one of them, and then June 7 and June 12, one right after the other."
On June 12, 2016, she lost her best friend and only daughter, Amanda when a man opened fire inside Pulse nightclub in Orlando in what was then the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The attacker killed 49 people and wounded 53 others before dying in a shootout with police.
Ten years later, Alvear still struggles to catch her breath as she recounts learning that her outgoing, family-oriented 25-year-old daughter had been killed.
'Please let her be alive'
Hours before her death, Amanda had called her father, Daniel Alvear, one of her best friends, to let him know she would be spending the night at a friend's house. Amanda was a student at Valencia College and lived with her parents in Davenport, Fla., at the time. She worked at a hospital and was a pharmacy technician and aspired to be a midwife and nurse.
Amanda and a group of friends went to a housewarming party before deciding on a whim to go to Pulse, an LGBTQ+-friendly nightclub that was hosting a Latin Night. They arrived an hour or so before a gunman, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, began firing.
Credit: Courtesy of Mayra Alvear
Later that morning, a friend of Amanda's called her brother, Brian, to tell him his sister had been at the club. The friend said she had been trying to reach Amanda but could not get through.
"Then they woke me up and turned on the news," says her mother, Mayra, 65, who now lives in Haines City. "And I just went crazy."
A devout Catholic, Mayra dropped to her knees and began praying before images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and saints displayed in her room.
"I was just asking God to please let her be alive. Let her be wounded, but don't take her away from me, because I already lost a son to cancer," she recalls through tears. "I was begging God to find her and keep her alive."
"But he had other plans," she adds. Mayra's family took her to the hospital where victims had been taken. There, they learned Amanda had not survived.
In the years since, Mayra has channeled her grief into preserving the legacies of the victims. She served on the committee that drafted the finals plans for the Pulse memorial. She also holds on to hope she will be reunited with Amanda and Nelson someday.
"What keeps me going is my faith, my relationship with God," she says. "Our crossover is for eternity. My belief and my hope is that's when I'm going to encounter my loved ones, my son and my daughter. I'm going to meet with them again. And that is going to be for eternity."
Credit: courtesy of Josean Garcia
'I feel different this year'
Josean Garcia was with Amanda and their other best friend, Mercedez Flores, at Pulse that night of terror in 2016. The three met in seventh grade at Boone Middle School in Haines City and later graduated from Ridge Community High School, where Amanda was crowned prom queen. Amanda and Flores weren't gay but they enjoyed going to Pulse, because they felt safe there and were supportive of queer people, Garcia recalls.
The group, who called themselves JAM, entered Pulse together but quickly separated when Garcia stopped to greet someone. A short time later, he heard gunshots and dropped to the floor. Because he had DJed at the club before, Garcia knew there was a door behind the DJ booth that could serve as an escape route. He went through the door and, after exiting the club, ran three blocks to his parked car.
"The whole time I'm running, I was hearing gun shots. It never stopped," he tells PEOPLE. "There, was no break. It was constant. That's why I kept running." At the time, Garcia believed there was more than one shooter.
Once he was able to compose himself, Garcia tried reaching all of the friends he'd gone to the club with, especially Amanda and Mercedez. Garcia says he repeatedly refreshed an article on his phone from a local news outlet that was tracking the names of the deceased victims.
"The list would get longer and longer, and I eventually saw [Amanda and Mercedez's] names," he says.
Surviving the mass shooting has changed the way Garcia navigates public places. "I don't do clubs or anything like that anymore," he says. "When I go to restaurants or public outings, I know where the exits are. I analyze everyone's faces. I'm so vigilant about everything around me. It's something I didn't do 10 years ago."
Garcia, 36, a singer and song writer, says Amanda and Mercedez were always supportive of his music career. A year after their deaths, he wrote a song about them titled "Fly Away." Only recently has Garcia spoken publicly at length about his experience, sharing a series of TikTok videos that have garnered millions of views.
This year, Garcia moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to care for his 80-year-old grandmother. He visited Pulse before it was demolished in March. During that visit, he says he learned that Flores had been less than 1,000 feet from him when she was killed. On the 10th anniversary of the massacre, he plans to join Alvear for dinner at one of Amanda's favorite restaurants, Pio Pio, back in Orlando.
"I don't usually do anything for the anniversary," Garcia says. "But I feel different this year."
Credit: Courtesy of Brandon Wolf
'The pain of loss and grief and trauma'
Like Garcia, Brandon Wolf survived the Pulse shooting but lost two of his best friends in the massacre: Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32, and Juan Guerrero, 22, who were a couple.
Wolf grew up in a rural town in Oregon and moved to Orlando in 2008. As a gay Black man, he says that in Orlando he found a sense of community that had eluded him in his hometown.
After arriving at Pulse that night, Wolf, Leinonen and Guerrero settled into their usual spot on the patio where Leinonen, a clinical psychologist who went by Drew, was known to offer unsolicited therapy sessions after a few drinks, Wolf says. That night was no different as he shared his thoughts on love and friendship.
Minutes before 2 a.m., Leinonen and Guerrero, headed to the the dance floor for one last dance, while Wolf went to a restroom near the front of the club. He was washing his hands when the gunfire erupted.
"The few of us who were in there questioned: Was it fireworks? Was it a malfunction in the music?'" he recalls. "Then when 10 or 12 people rushed through the door and crouched along the wall, their faces like they had seen the purest form of evil. That's when we realized that something much darker was happening in the club."
Wolf and the others debated whether they should run. The restroom had only urinals and offered little protection from the chaos unfolding outside. Wolf remembers the smell of blood drifting through the air. They locked arms and made their way through an area of the club painted black from floor to ceiling.
"As we got about halfway through the room, a sliver of light opened in the back of the bar from a door that I honestly did not know existed until that moment," Wolf recalls.
The group ran through an emergency exit into the parking lot. In the hours that followed, Wolf repeatedly called Leinonen. The next day, Guerrero's sister confirmed he had been shot more than half a dozen times and, when taken to a hospital, had not survived surgery.
"It was that moment, sitting on the front stoop of my apartment, that I understood what heartbreak meant for the first time," Wolf tells PEOPLE. "I just sobbed."
Six days after the shooting, family and friends gathered for Leinonen's funeral. Leinonen was passionate about helping people to feel like they belonged. He had founded Seminole High School's first gay-straight alliance in the early 2000s. At Leinonen's funeral, Wolf says he made a promise to never stop fighting for a world that Leinonen would be proud of.
Since then, Wolf has pursued a career in advocacy. "I think honoring him in that way — not just with words or sympathies, but honoring him with action — is what allows me to understand my purpose," he says. "It's what allows me to feel right being here when he can't be here."
Yet Wolf says he still grapples with survivor's guilt. "There's not a year that goes by that I don't ask myself why it had to be them and not me, why it had to be our community, why it had to be our club," he says. "The best way I have found to cope with that, and to learn to live alongside the complexity of healing, is to pour myself into honoring their legacy."
Wolf, who until recently was national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. , is now senior director of communications strategy and chief spokesperson for Equality Florida, the state's largest LGBTQ civil rights organization. Wolf says he was inspired by the Pulse shooting to move back to Orlando.
"It was important to me to demonstrate to people around this country that our communities are worth fighting for, that Florida is worth fighting for and that the best antidote to the kind of hate and violence that we saw erupt at Pulse nightclub — and that we've seen emboldened across the country over the last 10 years — is being in community with the people you love most," Wolf says.
"The thing I hope people understand 10 years on is that grief is not linear," Wolf says. "That healing isn't time-boxed. That there is no getting over it. You just learn to live alongside the pain of loss and grief and trauma."
Credit: Maria Wright
'It's hard to think of how much he's missed.'
Jerald "Jerry" Wright, 31, moved from Miami to Orlando in 2012 to work at Disney World. The weekend of the Pulse shooting, he wanted to return home to Miami to visit his parents, Maria and Fred, whom he spoke to every day. But because Father's Day was the following weekend, he told his mom he would take time off work and visit then instead.
"If he'd come to Miami, he wouldn't have been at Pulse," Maria Wright says. "It's made Father's Day hard for my husband ever since."
When his parents learned there had been a shooting at the nightclub, they texted Jerry. After they didn't hear back, they drove to Orlando. "Knowing him the way we knew him, he would have called us first thing in the morning," Maria, 66, tells PEOPLE. "And the fact that we had not heard from him, we knew something was wrong."
When they arrived in Orlando, they went to a family reunification center at a hotel, where Maria was asked to provide a photo of Jerry and whether she was certain he had been at the club.
The Wrights were sure he had been there. They had seen Jerry's car parked outside the club in news footage. As the names of survivors being treated at local hospitals were read aloud, Maria prayed Jerry's name would be called.
"I sat there, and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, I'm praying that my son is so badly injured that he can't call, because the only other explanation was that he was gone,' " she recalls. "And, of course, I wasn't ready to go that route. I was very much trying to hold on to hope."
Never one to draw attention to himself, Jerry wasn't the life of the party, Maria says, but its soul. "He would be the one making sure that you had a drink, you had food, that you were part of a conversation," she says. "If you were in the corner, he'd bring you in. The way he lived his life, he always reached out to people and always tried to bring people together."
"It's hard to think of how much he's missed," Maria adds. Maria's daughter, Aida, has three children, the oldest of whom is named after Jerry.
This weekend, instead of attending memorial events in Orlando, the family plans to do something Jerry would have loved: travel to Philadelphia to watch Ecuador's soccer team compete in the World Cup. Jerry, whose father was born in Ecuador, was an avid fan who had attended World Cups in Germany, South Africa and Brazil.
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"We asked ourselves, what would honor Jerry more: something that marks where he died and how he died and how horrible and terrible that was," she says, her voice breaking, "or something that he loved in life, where we celebrate family and roots and traditions and something that is joyful?"
Even amidst her heartache, Maria says Jerry continues to inspire her.
"The love he always gave me, his dad and all of us is, for me, one of the biggest things that has helped me survive this," she says. "I know he would have wanted me to laugh, live and feel joy and continue living because he loved me and he valued that."
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