Mothers’ Talk: Parental desperation over a terrible incident

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There are still many unknowns about June 12’s incident at Pulse in Orlando. The narratives are disparate, there may have been an international angle, a homophobic angle, a marriage angle. We can’t know, and the more we scratch at that wound, the worse we are for it.

But there are stories of what has happened since, and the most heart-wrenching involve the victims’ mothers.

The Guardian reports the story of Mina Justice exchanging text messages with her son Eddie as he was trapped in the nightclub. “I’m gonna die,” was one of Eddie’s texts to his mother encouraging her to call the police. “Call them mommy, now,” he messaged at 2:39 a.m. on June 12. Within a few hours, Eddie Mina was dead.

Mother Brenda Lee Marquez McCool was dancing with her son Isaiah Henderson when the tragedy happened, the New York Daily News reports.

Brenda saw him point the gun. She said, ‘Get down,’ to Isaiah and she got in front of him,” a friend told the paper. McCool was shot twice and was declared dead on Monday. Isaiah was pulled to safety.

Christine Leinonen, who became one of the more visible mothers in the media mayhem via her tearful testimony, wasn’t certain of the fate of her son Christopher. She drove to Orlando to try to find him, find out whether he and his boyfriend had survived the massacre.

I received a call that no mother should never receive, ever,”Christine Leinonen wrote in a Facebook post, as reported by the New York Daily News.“I am at a complete loss. They have positively identified my son, Christopher.

” … My heart is extremely heavy (and) I ask that you all continue to pray for me as well as other family members who have lost loved ones due to this senseless hate crime. I will never understand why or how this happened but I’m trusting God to see us through. I love you Christopher so much,” she told Michigan’s mlive.com.

“I’ve been waiting by the emergency room waiting, seeing if anyone gets called in,” she told ABC news in an interview Sunday. “They said there are a lot of dead bodies in the club … The hospital said there are some bodies at the hospital, that they came in and died.”

This tragedy affected more than the victims, more than policy. This tragedy has broken families to pieces. Our thoughts are with the families, and the mothers.

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