They survived one of the worst mass shootings in US history. What life looks like 10 years after Pulse

By Elizabeth Wolfe, CNN

(CNN) — Bass pumped through Pulse nightclub in the early hours of June 12, 2016, as more than 300 people packed one of Orlando’s most popular gay bars for a night of Latin music and hastily-mixed cocktails during the excitement of Pride month.

Just before 2 a.m., the din of the club was violently interrupted by the sound of gunfire. Keinon Carter and his friend Antonio Brown emerged from the restroom to investigate the sound, only to be suddenly struck by a line of bullets.

Over several hours, as Carter faded in and out of consciousness on the floor, a 29-year-old gunman killed 49 people and injured more than 50 others before law enforcement breached the club wall with an armored vehicle and killed him. Carter would later learn Brown had not survived.

At the time, the attack was the deadliest mass shooting in US history and the most violent terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11. The attack deeply wounded Orlando’s LGBTQ+ community, as the majority of those killed were young gay and Hispanic men, and the case was investigated by the FBI as both terrorism and a hate crime.

No survivor could have predicted how their lives would change in the months and years after such a traumatic event.

Some, like Carter, were forced by debilitating injuries to confront the reality of the attack every day. Others, like Tiara Parker, suppressed their grief and trauma until the weight of it all finally brought them tumbling to their knees. A handful, including Brandon Wolf, have coped by trying to build a world where such violence would not happen again.

Ten years after the shooting, survivors who spoke to CNN detailed their complicated – and still unfolding – recoveries, as well as their struggles with the guilt of living through the attack that took the lives of lovers, relatives and close friends.

Brandon Wolf, an advocate fueled by a whispered promise

Today, Wolf is living out a career his younger self would not have felt capable of.

In the summer of 2016, Wolf had pulled enough espresso shots and whipped so many caramel-drizzled Frappuccinos that the 27-year-old had been promoted to district manager of several Starbucks in Orlando, including one just down the street from Pulse.

He was steadily climbing the company ladder, well on his way to achieving his goal of working at Starbucks headquarters in Seattle and owning a little house in the suburbs, perhaps with a Subaru parked in the driveway.

He had in recent years become best friends with an effervescent 32-year-old man named Christopher Leinonen, whose nickname was “Drew.”

“He was one of the first people to challenge me to be the most unapologetic version of myself,” said Wolf. “We were inseparable for years.”

The pair became so inseparable Wolf got an apartment two doors down from Leinonen’s. They could burst in and out of each other’s front door like sitcom characters, always able to peek out the window to see if the other was home.

On the night of June 12, Wolf had invited Leinonen and his boyfriend, 22-year-old Juan Ramon Guerrero, to Pulse. He had hoped his friends could act as a buffer between him and his ex-boyfriend, whom he was meeting at the club that night.

In the years since, his memory has vividly preserved some moments from the shooting, while others seem to lie just out of reach. He can still clearly remember where he was when the shooting began: in the restroom, washing his hands. His eyes had rested on a flimsy plastic cup that had been abandoned on the sink, holding ragged lime slices and a slush of ice that was causing little beads of condensation to form on its sides.

What he cannot recall, though, are the faces of terrified people who rushed into the bathroom and huddled alongside him. Realizing he needed to escape, Wolf rushed for an exit door.

He had no time to find Leinonen and Guerrero, whom he had left on the dance floor to enjoy one last song.

“Nothing really prepares you for going out for a drink with your friends and then having to call their parents hours later to tell them that their kids are not coming home,” Wolf said. “The way that reshapes what’s important to you, the way it reshapes what you see as success in your life, is really profound.”

In the days leading up to a joint funeral service for Leinonen and Guerrero, Wolf struggled to write a eulogy that captured who “Drew” was to him. He had always been Wolf’s greatest champion and had recently told Wolf he deserved to dream bigger about his future.

As Wolf approached Leinonen’s casket on the day of the funeral, he was overcome with all of the things he wished he had said to his friend. It was the last time they would be together after spending every day just yards apart.

Leaning over Leinonen’s casket, Wolf felt moved to make a promise to his friend. He whispered: “I will never stop fighting for a world you would be proud of.”

Since that day, Wolf has grasped onto those parting words.

For about three years after the shooting, Wolf volunteered for local political campaigns, searching for somewhere to direct his grief and anger. His work led him to become the press secretary for Equality Florida, an LGBTQ+ civil rights nonprofit, and later the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, DC.

Alongside Leinonen’s mother, he co-founded a nonprofit, The Dru Project, in part giving scholarships to students they believe exemplify Drew’s spirit. He documented his experience at Pulse – and his unconditional love for Leinonen – in his memoir, “A Place for Us.”

Last month, Wolf announced he will move back home to Orlando to work again for Equality Florida as its senior director of communications strategy.

When he announced the move, Wolf nodded to Pulse, saying the aftermath taught him “what it looks like when communities refuse to give up on one another, when communities choose love over hate.”

Wolf still grapples with the slow fading of his memories. He hoards old phones, hoping to find a voicemail that will capture the high-pitched, almost squeaky tone that would fill Leinonen’s voice when he was excited to tell Wolf something.

He misses the tight-lipped smile Guerrero would give when he was trying to hide his braces, or the way Leinonen would walk ahead of them on giggly nights out, bouncing up on his toes as if he was about to float away.

Before Pulse, Wolf’s world revolved around his friendship with Leinonen. Now, he lives to honor it.

“I don’t think I was ever really the protagonist in my own story,” Wolf said of his life before Pulse. “I think that was actually Drew and I’m just the narrator, and it took Pulse for me to find that voice.”

Keinon Carter, whose painstaking recovery taught him to ‘take control’

Carter’s scant memories from after he was shot feel like something he has only seen in movies: scenes of the dark club were framed by his slowly-blinking eyelids, his vision blurring as he faded in and out of awareness.

He had fallen to the floor near a bar where go-go dancers would usually be twisting and turning under beams of strobing light. While trying to calm his breathing, he heard the gunman walking close to him, seizing him with horror.

In a split second, he felt the sharp impact of several more bullets hitting his body.

A fog enveloped his mind, and he blacked out again.

After arriving at the emergency room hours later, Carter had been rushed in and out of surgery in an attempt to revive him and halt his internal bleeding. Bullets had cracked his pelvis, shattered the back of his spinal column and torn through his leg, intestines and kidney.

Later, at the hospital, a nurse affirmed the worst fears of Carter’s sister, Shawnna Benbow: her brother was dead.

No more could be done, the nurse told her. Her brother hadn’t made it.

The nurse took Benbow to a solitary gurney where Carter was, draped in a white sheet. His sister snatched the sheet back in disbelief, only to see his blank face seemingly devoid of life.

But as she sobbed over his body, she was shocked to see Carter’s head move up and down, and he gently squeezed her hand.

Desperate to believe he was still alive, Benbow called in a crowd of doctors and nurses who looked on in shock as Carter slowly twitched his toes and lifted his thumb.

“Take him back,” Benbow demanded of the doctors, she recalled saying in the 2022 documentary “Surviving Pulse: Life After a Mass Shooting.” “Take him back into surgery. Do whatever you need to do to save my brother’s life.”

Over the next few weeks, Carter remained in a coma as surgeons tried to repair his organs and reconstruct his shattered bones. When he regained consciousness a month later, his eyes were flooded by the stark, bright light of a hospital room.

At 31 years old, his slender, 6’4” body was almost unrecognizable to him. He had undergone several more surgeries and now bore the scars to prove it. He would have to wear a colostomy bag. It was possible that he could never walk again.

“It was very, very scary,” he said. “I wasn’t prepared.”

A month had passed since the shooting. But outside, the city of Orlando had been reckoning with its horrific losses, holding heart-wrenching vigils, hearing emotional speeches calling for an end to anti-gay hatred and gun violence, and splashing rainbows on flags, business windows and makeshift memorials that dotted the streets. Carter missed it all.

“There was a time in the hospital where my friends and my sister didn’t allow me to see anything,” Carter recalled. He had no phone, no TV and no social media. “I didn’t even know my friend Antonio Brown was dead.”

Carter had only recently met Brown, a 30-year-old Army Reserve captain, and the two had been quick to form a friendship. Though they had only known each other for a few months, they spent almost every day together, Carter said.

“It just hurt real bad because I felt like I really, really, really, really, really, really lost a good one, and there’s no explanation for it,” he said.

He reentered the world after two months in the hospital with a heavy heart and a profound task of shouldering his mental and physical recovery.

“The healing starts as soon as you leave that hospital,” he said. “You’re trying to heal your mental and your physical at the same time. They both coexist.”

One blessing, Carter said, has been the support of his medical providers. By the time he left the hospital, he had racked up more than $200,000 of out-of-pocket medical expenses. The hospital waived his bill – and continues to do so as he gets ongoing care.

At home, Carter began an hour-by-hour adjustment to his new life. With the help of his boyfriend, he learned to navigate his home with a wheelchair. He could not wear his usual clothes, choosing to only wear loose clothing to accommodate a new colostomy bag and surgical scars.

In the first year, he underwent more than two dozen surgeries to correct the damage the bullets had done. As he started to learn to walk again, he willed himself to push through the unbearable pins-and-needles sensation that radiated through his legs when he challenged them to bear his full weight.

When he attempted to return to work, his body sent out distress signals – a deep ache in his back, rushes of pain spreading from his leg up his spine. He gave up his hope of returning to his livelihood in construction and spent years unable to work.

As he pushed his body toward recovery, he couldn’t help but feel anger over the amount of time it had taken for him to receive medical treatment on the day of the shooting.

Carter is one of several survivors and victims’ family members who believe if police confronted the shooter sooner, their loved ones would still be alive or survivors would have suffered less. He was among a large group of plaintiffs who accused the city in a lawsuit of failing to properly train their officers to react to active shooters, and alleged officers failed to immediately neutralize the shooter. The suit was ultimately denied by an appeals court.

In the years that followed, law enforcement agencies nationwide changed their response to active shootings, more clearly recognizing that the first officers on scene should move to confront the shooter immediately, even if alone.

If it was up to Carter, he would leave what happened at Pulse behind him. But he is forced to remember every day as his leg, hip and back ache and his muscles tighten to compensate for his injuries. On his worst days, the pain requires him to rely on a cane.

He has lost count of how many surgeries he’s had over the last decade. He stopped counting at around 60.

“I try to keep it out of my mind and keep pushing forward all the time,” he said.

Today, Carter is limited to working jobs that aren’t physically demanding. He works an administrative job at a window installation company, but he aspires to own a restaurant in the near future.

What cuisine you may ask? “That’s still my secret.”

Carter has also spent time over the years learning the ins-and-outs of nonprofit businesses, hoping to open a center to support Black LGBTQ+ youth.

He has learned through his recovery, he said, to “just take control of your own life, your own story, your own health, your own mental (health).”

As the 10-year mark approaches, Carter is ready to shut the door on what he describes as a “chapter” of his life.

“Why do I need to keep it open?” he said.

Tiara Parker, the cousin who grapples with survivor’s guilt

Though Pulse had always prided itself on being a hot destination for Orlando’s LGBTQ+ crowd, it also happily welcomed familiar locals, giggling bachelorette parties and out-of-towners who stepped through its doors.

Tiara Parker, a 20-year-old from Philadelphia, was visiting Orlando on a family vacation, and initially didn’t want to go to Pulse at all. She didn’t want to go out anywhere, for that matter, preferring to stay in the rental condo and relax. But her 18-year-old cousin, Akyra Murray, and her friend, Patience Carter, convinced her to join them on a night out.

“Why not?” thought Parker. They were on vacation, after all, and she had worked double shifts at her job as a public health educator so she could have extra money to spend.

Everything felt normal as the women danced to the club’s “Latin Night” -themed DJ set and took turns recording grinning videos on their phones. As 2 a.m. approached, they discussed taking an Uber home.

But at that moment, the sharp sounds of gunfire rang through the club. Parker froze, stunned and confused, while her cousin and friend sprinted for an exit. Realizing Parker was still inside, the women ran back into the building and the trio fled into a handicap bathroom stall, where they huddled with more than a dozen others.

They sat petrified as they heard the gunman approach the stall door. They heard him curse: His semi-automatic rifle had jammed. But he pulled out another gun and fired into their stall. Tiara was hit in her side and her arm and had graze wounds on her hip and back. She was relieved to see Akyra had only been hit in her arms.

As the three women lay silently in the stall waiting for rescue, they formed a morbid Morse code, using their fingers to tap or scratch to let each other know they were still alive. The shooter went in and out of the bathroom, talking with hostage negotiators on the phone.

Finally, the women began to hear action outside as police screamed at them to get away from the walls, and used a BearCat to ram a hole in the wall. During a shootout between police and the gunman, Akyra was struck behind her ear with a bullet, Parker said. Akyra was later pronounced dead at the scene.

“My cousin saved my life,” Parker said. “I knew I wasn’t responsible for what happened to her. Anybody who knew me and knew who I was, they know I would never let nothing happen to her.”

Even so, Parker felt blame and guilt for her cousin’s death. She felt Akyra’s parents were so consumed by grief and anger that they resented Parker. Though the cousins were only two years apart in age, Parker was keeping an eye out for Akyra, who was the youngest victim to die inside Pulse.

If Akyra had not returned to find her, Parker believes she likely would have died instead.

“It hurt. Survivor’s guilt really took a toll on me,” Parker said. “It broke my heart to have been blamed for my cousin’s death, knowing that I would have did anything to make sure she was here.”

Though Parker and Carter made it out alive, the shock of the shooting – and the physical trauma of lying still for hours with her wounds – took its toll. After she was carried out of the club, she found her legs would not move, even though they had not been hit. She had to go to physical therapy to recover her ability to walk.

Searching for a way to distract herself, Parker returned to work just weeks after the shooting. Looking back, she now knows that was too soon.

For three years, she descended deeper into depression, pushing off thoughts of that night as much as she could. Her relationship with Akyra’s parents and brother crumbled, she said, as they could not reconcile after the teenager’s death.

She was adrift on an island of her own. Parker was surrounded by friends and family who were willing to do anything to help her recover, but none could understand the horror she had endured. Those who shared her trauma were nearly 1,000 miles away.

Finally, on a day in 2019, the weight of it all – the blame, the horrific flashbacks, the loss of Akyra – became too much. She could no longer push back the encroaching feeling that she did not want to live anymore.

Parker collapsed under it all, finding herself in the throes of a nervous breakdown on the floor of her home in Philadelphia. She called her godsister and pleaded for her to come over and help.

“It beat me down,” Parker said. “As strong as I am, my strong wall fell, and I got tired, and that was the end for me.”

She sat in her room, knowing she had every right to sink into her grief.

“I realized, ‘I cannot stay here,’” she said. “I didn’t want to stay there no more, and I was so serious about that, and I had to call myself out of a dark space.”

She threw herself into her passion for makeup artistry, a transition she said “saved her life.”

“Being able to make up other people and make them feel beautiful – I learned that helping people is what makes me feel good,” Parker said.

Part of Parker’s recovery has included showing up for other mass casualty survivors in a way that only those who have experienced such a tragedy can.

Parker is the vice president of Victims First, a nonprofit founded by mass casualty survivors. The board includes survivors of Pulse, a 2012 theater shooting in Aurora and the 2017 Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting in Las Vegas. When tragedy strikes in American communities, she flies in to help victims make sense of what happened to them and get financial assistance.

“Sharing my story was also a big part of that,” Parker said. She shows other victims, “I am a real living being. … You can get through it.”

While she acknowledges many survivors find shooting anniversaries painful, she said the occasion has invited her to appreciate how much she has overcome.

“It definitely reflects how far I’ve come as a person and as a survivor of such a tragic event, and how I was able to recover and rebuild my life after going through what I went through,” she said.

As an increasing number of American communities – more than 4,000 and counting – have fallen victim to mass shootings since 2016, survivors increasingly say their path to healing is one that may never be complete.

For the Pulse survivors who spoke to CNN, marking 10 years since the shooting has surfaced complicated emotions. Though they are mixed on whether they will participate in memorial events in Orlando, all said they will take time to honor their lost loved ones.

“Healing is not linear,” said Wolf, who often shares his experience as a survivor publicly. “Orlando is a community that will probably never be fully healed.”

Every June 12, Wolf begins the day with ice cream for breakfast, he said, “because we all deserve a sweet treat on the hard days.” He then spends the morning flicking through photos and spending time with the friends Leinonen introduced him to “who have gotten me through the last 10 years.”

Parker, who recently gave birth to a son, has bowed out of attending memorial events this year so she can care for her baby. She visits Akyra’s grave each year around the anniversary of her death. Her cousin, who was about to begin her first year of college, “would have been amazing,” she said.

“I used to go sit at that grave site and I would be in full-fledged, ugly tears. Now, I go there and I talk to her as if she’s standing right there with me,” she said.

Carter will drive from Orlando to visit his friend Brown’s burial site for the first time. He hopes the pilgrimage will help him find a little more peace.

Even after all this time, Carter struggles to speak about Brown.

“All I can say about him: He was a true soldier. He was a real American patriot. He served for his country. That was the type of man he was.”

After a long pause, Carter added, “and a damn good friend.”

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