FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A decade later, Patience Murray says she feels called to speak about June 12, 2016.
It started as a girls night out.
Murray, her friend Tiara and her husband’s sister, Akyra, were enjoying the evening.
“We were just having the best night,” Murray said. “All the way up until the very point where everything just changed.”
“It was the very end of the night, and we were getting ready to leave and Tiara started looking at her phone to order the Uber,” she added. “We were almost out of there and that’s when we heard the gunshots going off in the other room.”
Murray and Akyra managed to exit the club unharmed.
“The only person that wasn’t with us at the time was Tiara, so we had to go back inside,” Murray said. “The choice to go back in was out of pure love.”
They found their friend, but the chaos forced them into a bathroom stall.
“The gunman actually came into the bathroom. All you heard was his footsteps and then he started firing into the entire bathroom,” Murray said. “I looked down and I saw that I was bleeding.”
“Tiara and Akyra were both shot as well, and you could hear people just moaning in agony and pain,” she added.
The gunfire stopped, but the terror continued.
“His gun jammed so we didn’t know what he was going to do, and it was like that for the next three hours until the police actually intervened,” Murray said.
Murray made it out with Tiara.
Akyra, who had gone back inside with her to find their friend, became the youngest of the 49 victims killed. She was 18.
The massacre remains one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history.
“This was an attack against a community of people who’ve only shown me love,” Murray said.
Today, Murray is still moved to share her story “to feel worthy of life.”
And at a time when support for LGBTQ+ Americans is reportedly on the decline, Murray says the message remains important.
“It’s sad that people are in such a divisive place, where it’s either my way or no way at all, and because I don’t understand you,” she said.
Murray’s message 10 years after the horror:
“To be an ally,” she said. “We all need to be that for each other.”
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