OAN Staff Addie Davis
6:00 PM – Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Nearly a decade after the tragedy, the Pulse nightclub building in Orlando was demolished on Wednesday to clear the way for a permanent memorial honoring the 49 victims of the 2016 mass shooting.
The City of Orlando purchased the property in 2023 with the intention of creating the memorial. The demolition of the site reportedly began at 9 a.m. local time, according to WESH. News footage captured an orange excavator dismantling the structure on Wednesday as workers sprayed water to suppress dust from the debris.
The demolition marks a somber milestone nearly a decade after a gunman opened fire inside the LGBTQ+ nightclub in 2016, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others. The tragedy stood as the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history until the 2017 Las Vegas massacre.
The shooter, Omar Mateen, 29, a U.S. citizen who was raised Muslim, was killed by law enforcement at the scene. Mateen was born in New York to Afghan-American parents, and he was a regular worshipper at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce. During the shooting, Mateen made a 911 call in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS — the Islamic State.
A survivor of the attack, Cesar Rodriguez, told the press that he has been waiting for “that building to disappear,” according to WESH.
“Because for us, the people that were trapped in there, it’s something we want to erase, and we don’t want to remember. We don’t want to see anymore. We need to see something better. Something that help us, help people to forget everything,” he continued.
Rodriguez, a member of the memorial’s design committee, told the outlet that the project has not met with universal approval. Like several other survivors and grieving families, he expressed frustration over the input process and the final design, acknowledging the somber reality that no monument can truly fill the void left by the tragedy.
“You want to feel a big relief, and many, many of the families, they don’t feel like that,” Rodriguez said. “They feel betrayed. They feel…angry. And for us, for the survivors, we feel like trash because we never going to forget everything we have in our minds, and mostly because the justice is not happening,” he continued.
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, speaking to reporters on Tuesday, stated that they are on track to complete the design of the building, which recently reached the 30% mark, in the fall and will finish the memorial in the summer of 2027, according to estimates.
He added that the Pulse sign and other building “artifacts” have been placed in storage, with the intention of incorporating them into the future memorial.
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