building by breaking a window and being immediately met with
the sound of a barrage of gunfire? “Where is it coming from,”
Smith submitted as the initial reaction.
Where? How much more? What else is waiting inside?
Amidst all the terrorism, Smith conveyed how officers never
lost sight of the mission. Take out Mateen, sure. But help the
people. Save the trapped patrons, who were texting messages
every few seconds such as, “he’s got a bomb. He’s going to blow
us all up.”
What the public might never read or hear about in the satu-
ration of coverage was just how widespread the police response
had to be to this incident. When 200 patrons fled the nightclub
– many of the injured by gunshots or being trampled – they ran
screaming into the streets. “Part of the chaos of the response,”
Smith noted.
Nearly three hours after the initial call – after Smith’s team
had taken fire from Mateen and one officer was hit in the hel-
met, and after the team pounded several holes in the wall near
where he was holding hostages with a battering ram on an ar-
mored vehicle – the confrontation came to a head. Through one
of the holes, officers could see the shooter sprawled with feet up
on the pile of rubble and his head at the base. He was believed
to be dead.
A final scare came when they saw what might have been a
battery strapped to his mid-section, a sign that he might have
an explosive device as he claimed.
“Turned out to be an exit sign that had fallen on him,” Smith
revealed. “We found no explosives in his truck.”
As a final note that would only resonate with fellow officers,
Smith confided how the ordeal did not end at 5:30 a.m. when
Mateen was found and all remaining patrons were rescued from
the bathroom where he held them for three hours. More than
50,000 people showed up for the vigil that followed, and those
Orlando PD officers who weren’t part of the Pulse response had
to post security.
VIP visits came during the days following, including one of
the rare moments when President Obama and Vice President
Biden were in the same place outside of Washington, D.C. It
went on for months, and Smith confirmed how great it was to
see the city come together but that officers needed to get past
the incident.
The Orlando Police Department offered ongoing counseling
to officers who were part of the response and were dealing with
post-traumatic stress. And to accentuate the healing, to move
past it and to confirm what was most heroic about the response,
Smith concluded his presentation with a slide showing the 49
victims in all their diversity: women, men, African Americans,
Hispanic American, Asian Americans and people of all orien-
tations.
“This was not a hate crime,” Smith reiterated. “It was a terror-
ist act.” d
www.njcopsmagazine.com
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