Pulse survivor on Las Vegas massacre: 'It hurts'
TALLAHASSEE — Monday morning, Brandon Wolf woke up in his Tallahassee bed to a slew of texts from friends.
"How are you?"
"Are you doing OK?"
"I just need to know that you're doing OK today."
It was 7 a.m. Wolf was confused. He hadn’t seen the news yet.
At least 59 people died and more than 527 were injured Sunday night at an outdoor music festival at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas. It is now the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Las Vegas: the city where vacationers go to forget troubles and dance the night away — and the city where Wolf's friends and former co-workers from his days as a Disney World performer now work.
Wolf is a survivor of the Pulse shootings last year in Orlando that left 49 dead, dozens injured, and a community scarred, but resilient.
Sunday’s attack was a trigger for Wolf and other Pulse survivors.
“I was just overcome with feelings of grief and pain again,” Wolf said about his reaction to the news. “It just — it hurts a lot.”
As images of the chaotic aftermath from Las Vegas emerged and the death toll climbed, he relived a nightmare.
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He remembers holding his breath in a dark Pulse nightclub bathroom, trembling with fear and confusion as gunshots sounded behind the door, feet away from him and a dozen others.
The night was over. Moments before, he and his closest friends Christopher "Drew" Leinonen and Juan Ramon Guerrero hugged on the dance floor and were each going to call Ubers to go home.
Wolf didn’t know that would be the last time he’d embrace them. His friends did not survive the attack.
He could relate to the horror of people at the Las Vegas festival.
“All you hear is fear,” said the 29-year-old Starbucks district manager.
Now, the sound of gunshots is an eerie reminder. He can’t bear to watch videos of Sunday night's concertgoers, crouched down or running away as gunshots fired.
“I just couldn’t watch that wall-to-wall coverage of … that happening,” he said.
Instead, he immediately reached out to fellow survivors and to leaders in Orlando, letting them know he’s available to lend an ear to anyone who needs it.
Since the Pulse attack, he started an LGBTQ advocacy nonprofit, The Dru Project, in memory of his friends, and became a volunteer with Equality Florida.
“I remember the thing that lifted me up the most was knowing that so many people cared,” he said.
Now, he wants to do the same for those impacted by the Vegas tragedy — to let them know they're not alone.
“It's about protecting each other, it's about surrounding each other with warmth and then, for the rest of this country, it's about doing something about it" — about gun violence.
“There's a lot of pain," he continued. Pulse survivors can be a support network for survivors of Sunday's massacre.
“We are going to need to do a lot of self-care, a lot of self-strengthening," he said, "so that we can be that shoulder to cry on.”
Follow Nada Hassanein on Twitter: @nhassanein_