\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
-
United States Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin told a gathering of top security officials Saturday that war with China was neither imminent nor unavoidable, despite rapidly escalating tensions in the Asia-Pacific region, stressing the importance of renewed dialogue between him and his Chinese counterpart in avoiding "miscalculations and misunderstandings."
-
Jurors resumed deliberations Saturday on whether a man should be sentenced to death after being convicted days earlier of the murders of his wife and his girlfriend’s two youngest children in Idaho.
-
Marian Shields Robinson, the mother of Michelle Obama who moved with the first family to the White House when son-in-law Barack Obama was elected president, has died. She was 86.
-
New York City police said Saturday that they had 34 people in custody following a pro-Palestinian protest at the Brooklyn Museum, which reported damage to some artwork and harassment to security staff by demonstrators.
-
The U.K.’s ambassador to Mexico has left his post after a video was posted on social media that purportedly shows him pointing an assault rifle at an embassy employee.
-
North Korea launched more trash-carrying balloons toward the South after a similar campaign earlier in the week, according to South Korea's military, in what Pyongyang calls retaliation for activists flying anti-North Korean leaflets across the border.
-
Mexico's drug cartels and gangs appear to be playing a wider role in Sunday's elections that will determine the presidency, nine governorships and about 19,000 mayorships and other local posts.
-
The African National Congress party lost its parliamentary majority in a historic election result Saturday that puts South Africa on a new political path for the first time since the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule 30 years ago.
-
Donald Trump sought to move past his historic criminal conviction on Friday and build momentum for his bid to return to the White House with fierce attacks on the judge who oversaw the case, the prosecution's star witness and the criminal justice system as a whole.
-
Joint British-U.S. airstrikes targeting Yemen's Houthi rebels killed at least 16 people and wounded 42 others, the rebels said Friday, the highest publicly acknowledged death toll from the multiple rounds of strikes carried out over the rebels' attacks on shipping.
-
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced Friday he has switched his registration to independent, raising questions about his political plans since the move could help his chances should he seek elected office again in a state that has turned heavily Republican.
-
The ambush shooting death of a Minneapolis police officer has stunned a department that has struggled to fill its ranks since the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing turmoil.