Today in history: 49 dead in shooting at Pulse nightclub

On June 12, 2016, a gunman opened fire at Pulse nightclub, a gay bar in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people and injuring 53. Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State during a three-hour standoff before being killed in a shootout with police.

On this date:

In 1630, the Englishman John Winthrop reached the Massachusetts Bay Colony at the head of a fleet of Puritan refugees, where he became governor.

In 1776, Virginia’s colonial legislature passed a Declaration of Rights.

In 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.

In 1963, 37-year-old civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot to death outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was sentenced to life in prison for Evers’ murder; he died in 2001.)

In 1964, South African black nationalist Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment along with seven others, including Walter Sisulu, for sabotage against the apartheid regime (all were eventually released, Mandela in 1990).

In 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down state laws banning interracial marriage.

In 1978, David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six “Son of Sam” .44 pistol murders that had terrified New Yorkers.

In 1987, during a visit to divided Berlin, Germany, President Ronald Reagan called on Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

In 1991, the Russians elected Boris N. Yeltsin as president of their republic.

In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were massacred outside their Los Angeles home. (OJ Simpson was later acquitted of the murders in a criminal trial, but was found guilty in a civil case.)

In 2004, the body of former President Ronald Reagan was sealed in a crypt in his presidential library in Simi Valley, California, after a week of mourning and remembrance by world leaders and the general public.

In 2020, Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by one of the two white police officers who responded after he was found sleeping in his car in the drive-thru lane of a Wendy’s restaurant in Atlanta. Police bodycam video showed Brooks struggling with the officers and wrestling a Taser from one of them, which he fired as he fled.