“People now feel more of a sense of their own history,” he said.įor Mr. Johnny Townsend, who interviewed survivors in the late ’80s and finally published their accounts in 2014, said the 40th anniversary commemoration gave it a kind of public attention it had not had before. As time passed, the tragedy became “a rumor” to new generations of L.G.B.T.
Rey said people who lived through that period did not talk about it for decades. Survivors had to deny any connection to the fire, including the loss of loved ones, because they could lose their jobs or apartments if bosses and landlords suspected they were gay. “There was never any sense of justice,” said Sebastian Rey, the president of the L.G.B.T. He committed suicide a year after the blaze. No one was charged with the attack, and a man viewed by many as the primary suspect was never arrested. The fire was an open wound for the gay community in New Orleans for years. people have a place at the table now that they did not have then,” said Clayton Delery-Edwards, who wrote a book about the arson that was published in 2014. Forty years later, a son of his, the current mayor, Mitch Landrieu, declared a day of public mourning for the fire’s victims on its anniversary. The mayor, Moon Landrieu, did not cancel his vacation. “They dug a hole in the ground and put a bag in it and covered it back up,” Mr. Those three were buried in unmarked graves in a potter’s field along with a fourth person, Ferris LeBlanc, whose family did not know his fate until last year, Mr. There are three people who were never identified at all. “His mother refused to collect his ashes because she was too embarrassed that she had a gay son,” Mr.
Camina, who directed a documentary, UpStairs Inferno, about the blaze. He was one of many who died without ever coming out to their families, and his mother would not deal with his remains, said Robert L.
Gay bar shooting full#
His charred body was left slumped against the window bars in full view of passers-by for hours. When firefighters extinguished the blaze, they found a pile of charred bodies, some embracing and others pressed against the windows.Ĭongregants from the New Orleans chapter of the Metropolitan Community Church, an L.G.B.T.-affirming group, were meeting there after services.
Gay bar shooting windows#
They also say she lied and tried to mislead FBI agents.One group of patrons fled out a back exit, but another was trapped across the room, caught between the flames and floor-to-ceiling windows fitted with metal bars. Prosecutors said Salman knew Mateen was buying rounds of ammunition for his AR-15, helped him spend thousands of dollars before the attack and knew about his plan when he left the house in the hours before the shooting. It was the nation's worst mass shooting in modern history before the massacre of 58 people in Las Vegas surpassed it last October. Mateen, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, was killed by police in the hours after the shooting. First, they must establish that a terrorist act was committed when he killed 49 in June 2016 at the gay club in Orlando prosecutors said he was motivated by Islamic terrorism. They also watched a video taken during the shooting by a survivor inside the club.įederal prosecutors are trying to link 31-year-old Noor Salman to the actions of her husband, Omar Mateen. They listened to one witness who hid under a dead body for three hours as shots were fired, and an Orlando police detective who choked up on the stand.
Gay bar shooting trial#
Jurors at the trial of the widow of a man who shot and killed 49 people at a Florida nightclub heard emotional accounts of what unfolded that evening.