\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
-
Russian air defences downed what authorities described as five Ukrainian balloons overnight, the defence ministry in Moscow said Thursday, as the sides kept up long-range strikes that have featured heavily in what has largely become a war of attrition.
-
The sound of a vehicle backfiring spooked a circus elephant while she was getting a pre-show bath in Butte, Montana, leading the pachyderm to break through a fence and take a brief walk, stopping noontime traffic on the city's busiest street before being loaded back into a trailer.
-
An Oklahoma man was arrested Wednesday after authorities accused him of throwing a pipe bomb at the Massachusetts headquarters of a group called The Satanic Temple.
-
The U.S. Senate killed the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday as the historic trial of the Cabinet secretary barely got underway.
-
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is at the forefront of European Union citizens' minds, with defence and security seen as key campaign issues ahead of the June elections, according to a study published Wednesday.
-
Mainstream political parties failed to act on European farmers' complaints for decades, one farmer says. Now the radical right is stepping in.
-
The U.S. Justice Department has agreed to pay approximately US$100 million to settle claims with about 100 people who say they were sexually assaulted by sports doctor Larry Nassar, a source with direct knowledge of the negotiations told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
-
Croatia 's governing conservatives convincingly won a highly contested parliamentary election Wednesday, but will still need support from far-right groups to stay in power, according to the official vote count.
-
Uber is helping investigators lookin into the account that sent a driver to the Ohio home where an 81-year-old man allegedly shot the woman to death because he erroneously believed she was part of a scam, the ride-hailing company said Wednesday.
-
Scientists say it's highly unlikely cloud seeding is responsible for the heavy rains that have caused flooding in the United Arab Emirates this month, and that climate change is the more likely culprit.
-
As wildfires ripped across Maui last August, the head of the emergency management agency dragged his heels about returning to the island amid the unfolding crisis, while a broad communications breakdown left authorities in the dark and residents without emergency alerts, according to a report released Wednesday.
-
An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.4 hit southern Japan late on Wednesday, said the Japan Meteorological Agency, without issuing a tsunami warning.