Pulse owner vows to reopen nightclub. Is it a good idea?

WSJ?s Jason Bellini sat down with him the day after the attack to hear his story. “My brother was gay and died of HIV”, explained Poma, “I was looking for a platform, a place to reach out to our gay community in Orlando”.

“It was a safe, fun place to come be who you are”, Barbara said on NBC’s Today show this morning. “It was supposed to be a safe place”.

She described the moment when she was contacted about the shooting.

“When my manager called me, and told me, he was just yelling into the phone, ‘We have a shooter, we have a shooter'”.

49 people were killed and 53 people were injured at the hands of shooter Omar Mateen.

Security guard Kimberly “KJ” Morris, 37, had only recently started working at Pulse.

Poma, who lost an employee in the rampage, said she can’t stop imagining the terror experienced by the people inside the nightclub during the shooting.

The co-owner of Pulse, the Orlando gay nightclub that became the scene of the worst mass shooting in US history on Sunday, founded the club to honor her brother who died of AIDS and to support the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

“It was the most surreal phone call I’ve ever received”, she said.

The club was in honour of one soul that was lost and now there are 49 others that have lost their lives.

The response of the city of Orlando has been “amazing” she said, paying tribute to the emergency services, police and the surgeons and medical teams who are still fighting to keep some victims alive. “We are not going to let someone take this away from us”.

“I have to go back to that club”.

The White House said this morning that President Barack Obama has been briefed on the massacre at the Orlando nightclub Pulse, where at least 20 people were killed. “He did feel very strongly about homosexuality”, Ms Yusufiy told CNN. For me, gay clubs represent the exact opposite of the shame I used to feel about being gay.

The Pulse nightclub will “always continue to be the heartbeat of Orlando”, Ms Poma vowed. “This awful act of hate will not stop Pulse”, she concluded.