West Palm Beach resident Brittany Scardino was just looking forward to a night of dancing at the Pulse nightclub.
"I've heard good things about it, and I heard it was Latin night. I was like, 'Oh, it's going to be a blast!' It was hopping, it was lively, it was loving, it was caring,"
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It was her first time at the club, but the innocence and joy of that night came to a tragic end.
"Their faces are just imprinted on my mind," said Scardino.
Rather than wait for last call and get one more drink, she and her friend decided to leave.
"We're walking, I'm halfway to my car, and all of a sudden I hear pop pop pop, 20 shots," she says.
"We're looking, and we just see people screaming and sprinting out the door. And we both just froze for a second, we were like, 'Oh....we gotta go.'
The images unfolded in front of her like a horror film
"One guy, you can see, he got shot right in the elbow. Like dead on. There's blood everywhere," said Scardino.
She made to make it away from the area and to her parent's house.
"Two minutes," she says. "That's what I keep thinking is two minutes. Two minutes after I walked out of that door."
"I would not be here. I know that. I wouldn't be. If I got that drink? I would not be here," said Scardino.
It wasn't until she woke up a few hour later that she realized the full extent of what happened.
"We were having fun. Enjoying friendship, enjoying company, meeting new people, growing and hanging out as a community. That's wrong?" she asks.
Happy to be alive, she's now dealing with the aftermath.
"We can't go to pride, we can't celebrate who we are as a community and the love. We can't do that," said Scardino.
The impact of Sunday morning's violence, she says, will prove to be far reaching.
"It wasn't just an attack on the LGBT community, it was an attack on the children, it was an attack on the brothers and sisters the moms the dads all those people in there," said Scardino.
