\r\nTo celebrate her graduation, Akyra, her parents and her 4-year-old sister travelled to Orlando for a family vacation.
\r\nOn Saturday, Murray told her parents she wanted to party in downtown Orlando. They dropped her off at Pulse at 11:30 Saturday night.
\r\nAt about 2 a.m., Akyra Murray sent a text message to her mother, saying that she and her cousins wanted to be picked up. She said there had been a shooting. Moments later, the phone rang.
\r\n\"She was saying she was shot and she was screaming, saying she was losing a lot of blood,\" Natalie Murray said.
\r\nMurray said her daughter was hiding in a bathroom stall, cowering from the shooter, her arm bleeding for hours with no medical treatment. Akyra Murray told her mother to call police and send help. They never spoke again.
\r\n\"It was devastating,\" Natalie Murray said.
\r\n\r\n(Facebook Image)\r\n"/>
\r\n\r\n Vaquer, who met McCool when they were kindergartners in Brooklyn, New York, said her friend gave good advice, backed up by life experience.\r\n \"She\'s smart,\" Vaquer said. \"She\'ll put you right.\"
\r\n(Image: Facebook)"/>
\r\n (Facebook via AP)"/>
© 2024 All rights reserved.
More from today's international headlines
-
Hannah Kobayashi, whose disappearance prompted a massive search and a missing persons investigation in Los Angeles, has been found safe, police said.
-
Fingerprints found at the scene of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare's CEO match those of suspect Luigi Mangione, two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter told CNN on Wednesday, as authorities continue to investigate the motive for the killing.
-
Israeli strikes pounded the Gaza Strip overnight and into Wednesday, with one attack ripping through a home where displaced people were sheltering in the isolated north. The strikes killed at least 33 people including children, Palestinian health officials said.
-
A Wisconsin man who faked his own drowning and left his wife and three children for Eastern Europe willingly returned to the U.S. after four months and was charged Wednesday with obstructing an intense lake search for his body.
-
At the same time the #FreeLuigi memes featuring the plumber from “Super Mario Brothers,” there were posts speculating about who could play him on SNL.
-
A suicide bombing in the Afghan capital on Wednesday killed the Taliban refugee minister and two others, officials said, in the most brazen attack on a member of the Taliban inner circle since they returned to power three years ago.
-
The father and stepmother of a 10-year-old girl found dead in her home in England were found guilty Wednesday of her murder after what prosecutors called a 'campaign of abuse.'
-
Several people attended a lookalike contest for a suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on Dec. 7.
-
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday named former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle as his pick to be the U.S. ambassador to Greece.
-
Only about two in 10 Americans approve of President Joe Biden's decision to pardon his son Hunter after earlier promising he would do no such thing, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
-
Suheil Hamwi spent 32 years in a Syrian prison, and now, after an offensive by insurgents that toppled the government of Bashar Assad, he's finally returned to his home in Lebanon.
-
South Korea's previous defence minister was stopped from attempting suicide while in detention over last week's martial law declaration, officials said Wednesday, as President Yoon Suk Yeol's office resisted a police attempt to search the compound.