\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
-
One person was killed and 23 others were injured when a bus crashed early Sunday on Interstate 95 in northern Maryland, police said.
-
Exactly six months before Election Day, Biden and Trump are locked in the first contest in 112 years with a current and former president competing for the White House. It's a race that is at once deeply entrenched and highly in flux as many voters are only just beginning to embrace the reality of the 2024 campaign.
-
Massive floods in Brazil's southern Rio Grande do Sul state killed at least 60 people and another 101 were reported missing, according to Sunday's toll from local authorities.
-
King Charles III's decision to be open about his cancer diagnosis has helped the new monarch connect with the people of Britain and strengthened the monarchy in the year since his dazzling coronation at Westminster Abbey.
-
Students protesting the war in Gaza abandoned their camp at the University of Southern California early Sunday after being surrounded by police and threatened with arrest.
-
Jose Raul Mulino, the stand-in for disqualified ex-President Ricardo Martinelli in Panama's presidential election, took the lead in early returns Sunday night, holding 34 per cent of the votes and a nearly 10-point lead over his four competitors.
-
If President Joe Biden meets his target of 125,000 refugees admitted this year, it would be the highest number of arrivals in more than three decades.
-
A gag order bars Trump from commenting publicly on witnesses, jurors and some others connected to the matter. The New York judge already has found that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, repeatedly violated the order, fined him US$9,000 and warning that jail could follow if he doesn't comply.
-
Heavy rains in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul killed 37 people, with another 74 still missing, the state civil defence agency said Friday, as record-breaking floods devastated cities and forced thousands to leave their homes.
-
Three bodies recovered in an area of Baja California are likely to be those of the two Australians and an American who went missing last weekend during a camping and surfing trip, the state prosecutor’s office said Saturday.
-
A well-known British Palestinian surgeon who volunteered in Gaza hospitals said he was denied entry to France on Saturday to speak at a French Senate meeting about the Israel-Hamas war.
-
A driver died after a vehicle crashed into an outer perimeter gate of the White House complex, and the incident late Saturday was being investigated as a traffic crash, police said. U.S. President Joe Biden was spending the weekend in Delaware, and the Secret Service said there was no threat to the White House.