Patience Murray was 20 years old when a night out at an Orlando club turned into hours of terror that left her shot in both legs, grieving a loved one and struggling to learn how to live again.
Now 30, Murray said the approaching 10-year anniversary brings "so many mixed emotions," describing it as "like a full cycle of healing, learning, and figuring out, you know, all the things that work for my nervous system, and just figuring out how to share my story to help other people as well."
WATCH KAYLA MCDERMOTT'S INTERVIEW WITH PATIENCE MURRAY BELOW:
"There are so many mixed emotions with the 10-year anniversary coming up, because a lot of things feel like a full circle moment," she said. "It's been like a full cycle of healing … but it's a lot of mixed emotions."
Murray said she had been living in Philadelphia when she traveled to Florida on a friend's family vacation. She and her friends searched online for somewhere to go out in Orlando. "The pictures looked great, the energy, the vibes looked amazing, you know. It was a lot of great reviews," she said.
"It only cost $10 to get in, and … it was 18 and up, so at the time I was 20, not 21 so it made sure that everybody was able to actually get in the club, so it was no brainer at that point."\
Pulse: The Night that Changed Us airs June 12 at 7:30 P.M.
Inside, Murray said the atmosphere felt joyful and affirming.
"The night at False Night Club was the best time ever," she said. "I can think back to those moments of us just laughing, and not just with each other, but the people in the club, like it was great energy, people were smiling. It was the best environment. Compliments were coming around left and right, and it felt really good in our own skin, just to be in there."
"It was just really infectious, positive, positive energy in there, and just from the performances that were going on … it was amazing," she said.
That changed, she said, just as she and her friends were preparing to leave.
"We were actually getting ready to leave," she said. "Out of nowhere, we just heard gunshots going off in the other part of the club, and at that time … I wasn't really sure what I was hearing or experiencing, but it just made me drop to the floor."
"So much was going on in that moment, like simultaneously, like you could hear just like chaos going on, the gunshots going off," she said. "I was just scooting backwards, like on the floor."
She said she remembered physically making it outside.
"My husband's little sister, Akyra, actually ran over to me, and I looked up, and I could see, like, the sky behind her hair, and that's why I knew that we made it outside," she said.
Murray said she and Akyra went back inside because their friend Tiara was still in the club. Inside, they followed other people rushing toward the bathroom.
"We, for whatever reason, decided to go in the bathrooms with them instead," she said. "I think that is a part that bothers me a lot, is like why we didn't try, like, to go back the other way that we had come, and that still like agitates my spirit just a little bit."
"We just, we went with the crowd into the bathrooms, and that's where we were held hostage for three hours," she said.
Murray said they crowded into the last, largest stall.
"At that point, I wasn't shot yet, but we could see other people in the bathroom," she said. "There was a woman who was holding her arm in the middle of the floor; she was wounded."
She said it was hard to grasp what was happening.
"There was a lot of denial, because everything was just great, everything was amazing, everything was wonderful, and then in a matter of a few seconds, minutes, everything was changed, and we're looking at people bleeding on the floor," she said.
Murray said she did not immediately understand that a woman saying "I've been shot" meant she herself was in the middle of a mass shooting until she heard the gunman enter the bathroom.
"I don't remember seeing him, but I remember hearing his footsteps," she said. "Things got really clear once you heard the footsteps, and then right after that, he just started firing into the entire bathroom."
She said she felt fragments coming from the wall and did not realize she had been hit until the gunfire stopped.
"That's when I looked down at my legs, and I saw that I was shot, and I looked across from me, and I saw that my friend was shot, and her cousin was shot," she said.
Murray said she was shot in both legs. The bullet in her right leg shattered her femur.
"I knew immediately that something was wrong when I tried to move, and it felt like something had actually crushed my right leg," she said. "When I looked down, I saw the blood streaming out of the gun wound from that leg, and that's when I realized I've been shot."
She described the bathroom as a place of "absolute chaos, fear, confusion."
"You're just looking to see if everyone else is okay," she said.
Murray said at one point the gunman's weapon appeared to jam, giving them a brief moment to absorb what had happened.
"There was a period of time, like, where things settled, because I believe at that point the gunman's gun jammed," she said. "It's just so many like moments of just terrifying feelings that continually come up."
She recalled hearing Akyra on the phone and people screaming. Murray said every second of the three-hour ordeal felt like "a long holding of your breath."
"Just being in those moments of not knowing if you're going to be saved, it really is scary," she said. "Every single moment was terrifying, every single second was terrifying."
She said she feared the gunman would return to their stall.
"Not knowing if the gunman was going to come into the stall and just shoot you in the face," she said. "It was a lot of just tenseness and panic."
Murray said the trauma stayed in her body for years.
"Over the years, I feel like it took a really long time to get most of that trauma [out of] my body," she said.
"That trauma really lives with you still, and every single moment, that's what it felt like, just tense, just extremely tense and fearful."
In the final moments, she said she heard a loud noise and sensed something change.
"I remember hearing a loud noise in another part of the club," she said. "I heard the gunman starting to move around, like you knew something was wrong."
She said she feared the gunman might detonate explosives.
"At the time, I wasn't sure if that was the gun. And then releasing his bombs that he said that he had in his car," she said.
"There was a lot of the fear around, are we going to get blown up, are we going to get shot?"
Murray said the gunman eventually came into their stall again.
"In those final moments, he was literally hovering over us, going to one person and shot them, went to another person and shot them," she said.
She recalled someone next to her moving closer.
"I felt their warmth on my body, I felt their breath in my ear, and then the gunman shot again, and then that person right next to me screamed," she said. "That's when the wall came crashing down in those final moments."
She said she could see flashes of gunfire as police exchanged shots with the gunman.
"When the police came through the wall, everything just fell, the stall wall fell, as the debris from the wall fell," she said. "I could see through, like this little like hole in all of the brick, the light flashing from the gunfire going back and forth."
Even years later, Murray said her mind returns to how narrowly she survived.
"Sometimes you can't fully be free when you're, you know, when you experience something as I've experienced," she said.
"That fear just really stays with you, and it shows up in how you live your life. It shows up in the risks that you don't take, it shows up in the things that you don't do."
She said she often wonders, "What if something like that happens again, or could something like that happen again."
After she was taken to the hospital and underwent surgery, Murray said she struggled to understand what had happened and what it meant to have survived when Akyra did not.
"It was very hard to process all of that," she said. "Even seeing the names go across the screen, so very trans-like."
"Actually getting the news that Akyra didn't make it, it was very hard for me, because we made it out, like we actually made it outside of the cup," she said. "It was a lot of self-blaming, like should have never went back in, like all the things, all the scenarios you could actually think of, of how you could try to blame yourself in a moment like that."
Murray said Akyra's mother helped her release some of that guilt by telling her that if any family member had been in the club, "we would have gone back in for them."
"That was really helpful for me in that moment to release that," she said.
Physically, Murray described her recovery as "very gruesome" and "excruciating."
"Just that process of learning how to even like move your legs again, it was so painful," she said. "There wasn't any glamorous part of this where I can say, yeah, like I felt like, like this chin at the end, I felt like a victim every day, and I was angry, and I was really upset, and I was so mad at the world."
Despite that, she said she set a clear goal for herself.
"I was pretty determined to be walking in heels by my 21st birthday," she said. "I made the decision that I'm going to be walking in heels on by my 21st birthday, and I did the work." "From June until March of the following year, I actually ended up being in my heels," she said. "Now was a little wobbly, definitely looked weird. I shouldn't have been wearing heels, but I was in the heels."
She said celebrating her 21st birthday out in heels was a major milestone, even though she still had unresolved trauma.
"That was a big accomplishment," she said. "I definitely still crashed out, like there was a lot that I didn't process fully, so it was a lot of pent up, you know, like fears, and just like the nervous system wasn't fully regulated."
Murray credited her now-husband with pushing her to keep living and going out.
"He really pushed and you know encouraged me and Tier, so my friend at the time really encouraged us to just keep living, keep telling a story, keep living, keep moving," she said. "So he's a lot to thank for that."
Murray said one of the most surreal moments after the attack was meeting President Barack Obama.
"Meeting President Obama was a surreal experience," she said. "In the midst of something so terrible and so just scary in life. There was just like one moment of like extreme joy and extreme happiness that somebody you know cared."
She said Obama wrote a message in her journal that she still keeps close.
"He wrote 'dream big dreams,' and that I still have that journal, and I look at that literally like every week," she said. "I look at that journal and just remember to dream big dreams."
Murray said that the encounter became "a catalyst for continuing to persist on and create a life after the tragedy, and quite frankly, dreaming big dreams in spite of everything that had happened."
She channeled her experience into a book she described as "a little mini memoir of me talking about four holes, and after Pulse of how we were, you know, able to make something beautiful for something so terrible."
She said she wrote it in part because "a lot of people didn't really understand the full gravity of what had happened," and because of conspiracy theorists "saying the most insane, horrible, mean things."
"I just wanted to take some agency over my own story, and also our story from that night, and really share that in a way," she said. "It was just a therapeutic experience."
Murray, a singer, said she also turned to music and songwriting as a form of healing. She wrote a song called "Champion" that she said was "inspired by this overcoming experience of just moving through the pain and not allowing yourself to be a victim forever and choosing to look at yourself as a champion that you are."
"Asking literally in the song for the Lord to come save this world, because so much is happening," she said. "That song is so resonant today. You look at the events that are going on today, so I think a lot of beautiful, you know, art came from that experience."
Murray said survivors still reach out to her in response to her work.
"There are still survivors that reach out to me that just let me know, like I'm so proud of you," she said.
But many others, she said, remain "stuck in that place of pain and stuck in that place of darkness" even a decade later.
"It's so sad, because there's so much more life to live, there's so much more life to live," she said. "But there's a lot of people that are still hurting, that are still struggling, that are still, you know, in pain from people that they lost from also just experiencing that night, so there's a lot of PTSD that survivors still have."
She said her own trauma comes "in ebbs and flows" — but after 10 years, she said she is still moving forward.
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