Pulse Massacre Victims File Police Complaints Saying Exits Were Blocked

On the night that the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was attacked by a gunman with a high-capacity rifle, Jorshua Hernández spent three hours bleeding in a bathroom stall, unable to find his way to an exit.

Another patron, Javier Nava, saw a ladder suspended from the ceiling and thought it could help him escape to the roof. But the ladder led only to a loft-style office, where he was trapped with a bullet wound in his abdomen. César Rodríguez, who on a whim had gone to Pulse to enjoy Latin Night, recalls seeing people trying to flee out an exit door, only to come rushing back inside because the alley outside had no exit.

“If they had more doors, one could survive and there wouldn’t be so many dead,” Mr. Hernández, 29, said. “If the windows had not been covered, we would have looked for alternative ways to get out. I have always said it: That place had one way in, and one way out.”

Questions about the design, unpermitted renovations and code enforcement at the nightclub where 49 people were killed and 53 others were injured in 2016 have been raised periodically over the years. Both the club owner and city officials said that the facility had sufficient exits and complied with all required building regulations. The full weight of responsibility for the nation’s second-deadliest mass shooting fell on Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old security guard who carried it out and then died in a shootout with the police.

But survivors and relatives of some of those who were killed are now raising these questions anew. In July, more than two dozen of them filed complaints with the Orlando Police Department seeking a criminal investigation into whether insufficient exits, ad hoc renovations and lax code enforcement could have contributed to the staggering death toll. City officials and the club owner say that the club was in compliance with building code requirements and that it is wrong to suggest that such problems led to more deaths.