A mother has recounted the last text messages she received from her terrified son after a gunman opened fire inside Pulse nightclub in Florida on Sunday. Mina Justice was outside the club trying to contact her 30-year-old son Eddie Justice, who texted her when the shooting happened and asked her to call police. He told her he ran into a bathroom with other club patrons to hide.
Screen captures from WFTV shows the messages between mother and son showed Eddie had sent Mina a text saying “I love you” before informing her there was a shooting taking place.
“Mommy I love you. In the club they shooting,” the text reads.
“U ok,” she responded before her son wrote back “trappp in bathroom.”
His mother then asked which club he was in and asked him to call her.
“Call them momm. Now, I’m tell I’m bathroom. He’s coming. I ‘m gonna die,” Eddie wrote
His mother responded: “They say stay them is anybody hurt. Which bathroom u in.”
Mina Justice said she was going through hell as she stood outside the nightclub waiting to learn more information regarding the shooting.
She told WOFL her son Eddie told her he was being held hostage inside a women’s bathroom and that he was going to die.
“I think it’s all of them in the bathroom. I could hear a lot of people crying,” she told the station as she recalled a phone conversation with her son.
The anxious mother of three said she did not know if her son was okay. At the moment, his condition is not known.
When asked how her son sounded, she said, “Bad, just afraid he’s gonna die.”
Mina also said at one point during her conversation with Eddie, she made him get off the phone with her and text instead while she asked him questions because he was fearful he was going to look at the shooter and get shot.
“He said, ‘He has us and he’s fixin to kill us. That was it'” the mother added.
The gun man who has been identified as Omar Matten shot dead at least 50 people and injured over 53 others in a crowded gay nightclub before being killed by police in what authorities described as a “domestic terrorism incident”
Source: WOFL/WFTV