Police officer Omar Delgado was on duty in Eatonville, Florida on the night of Sunday, June 12, 2016. He was responding to a disturbance about 2:00 AM when he heard a "signal 43" from Orlando. A signal 43 means "Rush! Officer needs help."
Delgado drove eight miles south expecting the emergency - whatever it was - would be over before he got there. But it wasn't. When he arrived at the Pulse nightclub shots were still being fired and victims were still in the building. The shooter would not be stopped for another three hours.
Officer Delgado went into the building with the 2nd wave of responders and saw dozens of people lying on the floor. He assumed they were playing dead and he called out to them: "Hey, come on, get up! Let’s go! We have cover for you. Police! We’re here.”
As he called out, Delgado realized in horror that these people were not playing dead, they WERE dead. Or they were dying. As he watched, he saw some of the bodies start to twitch as the last thin threads of life gave way. "They didn't want to give up," he said. That terrible sight triggered months of nightmares.
A fellow officer who had served in Afghanistan said the horrors in the Pulse nightclub that night were worse than anything he saw in the war.
Bullets were still flying and the police were worried there might be a bomb in the club when Delgado went to work trying to identify and save the living. As he helped one woman escape he deliberately shone his light in her eyes so she wouldn't see the bloody bodies all around her.
One of the people he saved was Angel Colon who remembers: "He grabs my hand and says, ‘This is the only way I can take you out.' I’m grateful to him, but the floor is just covered with glass. He’s dragging me out while I was getting cut.” Angel asked Delgado to carry him instead. Colon said. “I just saw him, his size, his glasses, so I’m like, ‘Just help me, please.’”
When he couldn't save anyone else Delgado stood guard over the bodies. He saw some of the dead had terrible disfiguring wounds and felt like he had to stop that from happening to others. He guarded one woman about whom he said, "She was kind of my baby, per se, I was watching her. I knew she was gone."
At one point that evening Delgado sent a message to his children, letting them know he loved them, just in case. He finally left the scene at 9:00 AM.
Delgado suffered from PTSD-like symptoms for months after the attack. He found it difficult to sleep and felt panic whenever his cell phone rang. The sound reminded him of the phones of the victims ringing in the night club, the phones of the dead, the phones that would never be answered again.
Delgado tried to go back to work on the 4th of July weekend after the attack but he had a flashback and could not continue. Since then he has been treated for nightmares and depression.
Unable to perform all of the normal duties of a police officer, and thus losing out on overtime, Delgado sought financial help from a GoFundMe account and also from the OneOrlando Fund which was set up to provide money to survivors of the Pulse night club attack. Unfortunately, that fund was only for people who were actually in the club when the shooting started so it did not provide any assistance to Officer Delgado.
Ultimately, Delgado lost his job just six months before he would have been fully vested in the pension plan. (According to one source he will receive a pension equal to 42% of his salary but that will only kick in 10 years from now.)
When Officer Delgado was called to risk his life to save people at the Pulse night club he did his duty. When his traumatic experiences left him needing help it seemed there was no help to be had.
For more information on Officer Delgado check the links below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/us/orlando-shooting-police.html
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/17/health/beyond-the-call-delgado-orlando/index.html
http://lawofficer.com/exclusive/tale-two-stories/
http://abcnews.go.com/US/pulse-nightclub-hero-dismissed-police-department/story?id=51613661
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[In this book shooting victim Gabby Giffords argues for responsible gun ownership.]
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Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Wayne Gadway
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