Police inside as shooting went on

Officer: Waited ‘15 or 20 minutes’ for Orlando SWAT team

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer (left) and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch view a memorial at City Hall of 49 wreaths, one for each victim of the Pulse nightclub shooting, on Tuesday in Orlando, Fla.
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer (left) and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch view a memorial at City Hall of 49 wreaths, one for each victim of the Pulse nightclub shooting, on Tuesday in Orlando, Fla.

ORLANDO -- A Belle Isle police officer who was among the half-dozen first responders to the shooting massacre at an Orlando nightclub has given the first public account of what happened in those critical early minutes.

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AP/Orlando Sentinel

Demonstrators hold signs and embrace Tuesday as family and friends of Miguel Honorato, a victim in the Pulse nightclub attack, arrive for funeral services at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Apopka, Fla., north of Orlando.

The officer, Brandon Cornwell, 25, who went inside the club after his team responded to reports of the initial gunfire between Omar Mateen and a security guard at the Pulse gay nightclub, said the officers were soon ordered to hold their position for "15 or 20 minutes -- could've been longer" until the special weapons and tactics team arrived.

He said that after arriving on the scene, the team broke through a large glass window and entered the club as the killing of 49 people was underway inside. He said the team spent the first seconds inside "trying to locate exactly where the shooter was -- we kept hearing people scream and shots fired."

Cornwell said they never saw Mateen, that the shooter had vanished inside the dimly lit club as Cornwell and the other officers followed the sounds of screams and echoing gunfire to the restroom area where they presumed the gunman was holed up.

He said they aimed their assault rifles toward that area as the sounds of gunfire stopped. It was then, he said, that they followed orders to hold their position.

Citing the ongoing investigation and instructions not to talk about such details, Cornwell declined to clarify what the officers did during those 15 or 20 minutes -- whether, before the SWAT team arrived, the officers spent that entire period inside the club or withdrew to the outside at an earlier point.

Cornwell spoke at Belle Isle's City Hall in the presence of the Belle Isle police chief, who occasionally stopped him from offering too much detail, and two colleagues who also responded to the shooting but did not go inside the club.

He did not second-guess the decision to hold their position rather than attempt to go into the area where Mateen had hostages.

"We just basically stayed there, waited for movement, and we just held our position until SWAT got there," said Cornwell, who never fired his weapon. "Once SWAT got there they told us to retreat, that they'd take over because we were not really in tactical gear -- we were just in our police uniforms."

As the FBI continues its investigation of the mass shooting, Cornwell and his fellow officers' early standoff with the shooter is being scrutinized by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's Public Integrity Squad, along with the other police encounters with the shooter.

The FBI said Monday that police first responders "engaged the shooter" inside the club at 2:08 a.m., but Cornwell's account raises questions of why first responders were told not to pursue Mateen into the restroom.

While some survivors described harried rescues by individual officers during the first half-hour or so, others inside the club remained trapped for hours. Some were rescued at 4:21 a.m. -- more than two hours after the shooting began -- by police working from outside the building. The FBI's timeline does not describe any SWAT movement into the building until 5 a.m., three hours after the attack started.

Cornwell, a second-year police officer who served with the Army National Guard in Iraq, said he was helping with a traffic stop when he heard the call on his radio that shots had been fired at Pulse. He said he arrived "in 38 seconds."

The Belle Isle Police Department, just south of Orlando, has an agreement to assist the community of Edgewood, which is near the Pulse nightclub.

"Some [of the other first responders] ran towards the building, some stayed back with people running out," he said. "There was tons of people running out of the club. I grabbed my assault rifle and ran toward the club. At this point the shooter is still actively shooting inside."

Cornwell converged on the south side of the building near the main entrance with perhaps five other officers, all from the Orlando Police Department.

"There happens to be an OPD lieutenant commander who was there, and he says we've got to go in," said Cornwell. "No one disagreed. One of the officers busted out one of those side windows" -- it was approximately 10 feet tall -- "and we just went in and went from there."

He estimated that "no more than two minutes" had elapsed since they arrived, and they were then inside the club.

Cornwell said Mateen was nowhere to be seen. The club was dim and quiet except for the sound of the shooter's gunfire, screams and cries for help, Cornwell said.

"He was actively shooting," he said. "I can't say if he was targeting us. But he was still shooting in that location where he was at."

Cornwell and the other officers immediately began "clearing rooms" one by one -- not knowing whether there was one or possibly more shooters. Fairly quickly -- Cornwell said "within minutes" -- officers located Mateen in the restroom area.

At that point, Cornwell said, "we took up a tactical position by the bar standpoint in the middle of the club." As Cornwell aimed his rifle toward the restroom door, he said, the shooting stopped. And it was then that the "15- or 20-minute" holding pattern began, he said.

Though Cornwell said he cannot recall how he received his orders -- whether it came on the radio or was verbal -- his understanding was that he and his fellow officers were to hold their position rather than attempt to go into the restroom after the shooter.

Asked whether he felt an urge to pursue the shooter at that point, Cornwell said: "I couldn't tell you. I was following lieutenant's command."

At some point during the 15 to 20 minutes -- it is unclear exactly when -- Cornwell and the others in the group of first responders withdrew to the outside of the club, he said.

"We got word from higher up, and it was communicated to the OPD lieutenant that we needed to withdraw," he said. "So we came back outside. And waited for SWAT. SWAT arrived. SWAT handled everything from there."

All the events he described happened in the first half-hour or so of the three-hour ordeal, which ended with Mateen and 49 others dead and more than 50 people wounded.

Lynch's comments

None of the other officers involved have spoken publicly, though Cornwell and others were in attendance Tuesday afternoon when Attorney General Loretta Lynch visited the city to pay respects at a memorial.

Lynch praised the actions of first responders and met with victims' relatives and with prosecutors. She called the rampage a "shattering attack, on our nation, on our people and on our most fundamental ideals."

"This was clearly an act of terror and an act of hate," she told reporters.

Lynch also directly addressed the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, saying, "We stand with you to say that the good in the world far outweighs the evil ... and that our most effective response to terror and hatred is compassion, unity and love."

In an interview earlier in the day, Lynch said the Orlando massacre shows that no one yet has "found the magic bullet" to prevent Americans from being inspired to violence by jihadi propaganda on the Internet.

Lynch said investigators may never pinpoint a single motive and not have not discounted witness reports suggesting Mateen might have previously visited Pulse before or had gay tendencies.

"We are still looking into that, and we are not ruling anything out," she said.

Information for this article was contributed by Stephanie McCrummen and Abigail Hauslohner of The Washington Post and by Eric Tucker, Mike Schneider, Alex Sanz, Alicia A. Caldwell and Sadie Gurman of The Associated Press.

A Section on 06/22/2016

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