Carter dropped to the ground and crawled toward the door, making it outside with Murray before they realized that Parker was missing. They rushed back inside amid the gunshots, found her and took shelter in a bathroom with other clubgoers.
They hide in a stall but Mateen walked into the bathroom and started shooting, Carter was shot in both legs, Parker in the side and Murray was bleeding profusely from a wound to her arm. Carter said as she layed on the floor she looked into the stalls next to her and saw bodies piled on top of each other on the toilet seat.
Mateen made a 911 call from the bathroom then he said "the reason why am doing this is I want America to stop bombing my country" meaning Afghanistan where his parents migrated from. After he ended the call he asked "Are there any black people in here?"
Carter said she was too scared to speak but another person hiding in the bathroom answered him. Then Mateen said "I don't have a problem with black people, this is about my country, you guys suffered enough." There after Mateen had multiple conversation with the remaining people in the bathroom until Police opened fire, blowing open the bathroom wall, and the room started flooding with water from burst pipes.
"I made peace with God within myself , and prayed for my pain to stop. I said God, if this is how I have to go, please take me, I just don't want any more shots, I didn't want to feel any more pain." Carter said.
After a while SWAT officers shouted warnings to move from the walls so they could blow them open, and Carter said Mateen shot and killed another three people including a stranger who shielding her.
"If it wasn't for that person shielding me, it would've been me shot and I wouldn't be sitting here today. We went from having the time of our lives to the worst night of our lives in a matter of minutes." She added
Parker and Carter were laiter found by police and taken to hospital in different ambulances. Murray lost her life, she is the youngest victim of the 49 people killed. Murray had just graduated high school a week earlier in Philadelphia, she was celebrating her graduation with her parents and 4 year old sister in Florida, where her brother, Alex, attends college.
Carter said she feels guilty about not telling the teen to stay outside before she went back in to find Parker, but Murray's mother "told me to not feel guilty, God has his plan." At the conference Carter was in tears as she read a poem she wrote about surviving the shooting. "The guilty of feeling lucky to be alive is heavy" she said in one of her poem lines.
Source: US magazine
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