Florida Nightclub Shooting 911 Call Audio Released
PAUL: 44 minutes past the hour right now, and newly-released 9-11 calls reveal a closer look, let's say, into what happened at the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting back in June.</s>BLACKWELL: Yes, we're hearing more of what the gunman told 9-11 operators and police negotiators during that stand-off in the club in Orlando. 49 people, you'll remember, were killed, 53 others were wounded. Here's CNN's Miguel Marquez.</s>MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: In the midst of the unfolding horror and chaos, people fleeing, others shot being carried from the bar. In the end, hundreds of calls to 9-11 operators.</s>UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: Yes, we have gunshots at Pulse.</s>MARQUEZ: Perhaps the most disturbing of all, one call came from the shooter himself, Omar Mateen. Even just the transcript is chilling. "This is Mateen. I want to let you know I'm in Orlando, and I did the shooting." The 9-11 operator tries to engage him. "What's your name", says the operator. "My name is I pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State." The operator continues to try and engage Mateen, but almost as soon as the call starts, he hangs up. As the massacre unfolded, Mateen called 9-11 several times, and operators desperately tried to call him back. It's not clear there was ever any more discussion between Mateen and the 9-11 operators. For three excruciating hours, Mateen held up in the building, at first moving through the club looking for victims. For the first time, we're seeing the actual attempted negotiations between police and Mateen. "You have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq", Mateen tells negotiators. "They are killing a lot of innocent people. What am I to do here, when my people are getting killed over there? You get what I'm saying?" The gunman telling police his attack on the nightclub was in retaliation for an airstrike that killed ISIS leader Abu Waheeb, an Iraqi who fought the U.S. during the insurgency in the Iraq war, and later joined ISIS as a military commander. "That's what triggered it, OK?" Mateen tells negotiators. It's unclear why Mateen attached such importance to Abu Waheeb's death. Nothing in the transcript tells us why. Mateen mentioned other terrorist attacks, like the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, that killed three, and injured hundreds. "My homeboy, Tamerlan Tsarnaev", says Mateen, "did his thing in the Boston Marathon. My homeboy did his thing, OK? So now it's my turn, OK?" He told negotiators he was wearing a vest, teasing them at times about whether or not it was explosive, and whether bombs were in his car. No explosives were ever found. Mateen threatened, "your people are going to get it, and I'm going to ignite it if they try to do anything stupid." Mateen was finally killed when police stormed the building shortly after 5 AM, more than three hours after the shooting began, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, 49 people dead. Miguel Marquez, CNN, New York.</s>PAUL: Well the worst Santa Ana winds of the season are fueling a wildfire threat in southern California. Meteorologist Allison Chinchar has been looking at it. What are you learning, Allison?</s>ALLISON CHINCHAR, CNN METEOROLOGIST: And good morning to you. Yeah, we take a look at what we've got going on for you here today. The winds are going to peak today, with the temperatures peaking tomorrow, and it's that combination of the two that could potentially fuel some fires. We'll have some more details coming up.