Before unveiling the new design for the memorial to the victims of the June 12, 2016, mass shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, Donna Wyche said: “I think you are going to be ecstatic with what you see today.”
Wyche, the liaison between the city of Orlando and the Pulse Memorial Advisory Committee, was speaking to survivors and relatives of those killed in the attack on the gay and Latino nightclub.
Forty-nine people died in the attack at Pulse. Most were Latino, and at least 23 were of Puerto Rican origin. Dozens of others were wounded, some of them seriously. Until 2017, it was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
The city of Orlando commissioned private companies to design the memorial after the nonprofit onePulse Foundation, which originally had that responsibility, dissolved in 2023 amid allegations of misuse of donated funds and conflicts of interest.
The presentation of the new design, led by the memorial’s developers and city officials, took place on March 5, 2026. At the end, members of the public attending in person and online were each given three minutes to comment. It quickly became clear that, rather than euphoria, the presentation had provoked anger among some audience members.
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“I strongly disagree with the plans and the process that produced them,” said Christine Hannivan, the first person to speak.
“The City is exploiting the dead and repeatedly harming the living… The 49 who were murdered deserve a respectful, dignified and peaceful memorial that their families control, not the City of Orlando. The Pulse Memorial shouldn’t be overdesigned, an attention-grabbing tourist destination and vanity project. It shouldn’t repeat onePulse mistakes,” Hannivan added.
Some relatives and survivors of the Pulse attack, organized under the group Pulse Families and Survivors for Justice, opposed the inclusion of a museum in the memorial proposed by onePulse Foundation. The new memorial design overseen by the city of Orlando does not include a museum, but it does propose an area called the “Survivors Gallery” and a “Visitors Pavilion.”
The Visitor Center would include objects that belonged to Pulse nightclub and were on-site at the time of the massacre, including chandeliers, mirrors, a bar top, the cash register, sections of the wooden floor and other artifacts.
“Items left outside the perimeter of the fence by family members, friends and/or visitors were collected and stored for historical curation,” the city of Orlando says on its website dedicated to the Pulse memorial.
In response, the group of relatives and survivors organized under Pulse Families and Survivors posted on X: “We have always been against the museumification of mass murder. No artifacts. No exhibits. They are building a visitor center.
“We have been against turning a massacre into a tourist attraction. No spectacle. They are building a rainbow-washed LGBTQ death tourism destination.”
We have always been against the museumification of mass murder. No artifacts. No exhibits. They are building a visitor center.
— Pulse Families & Survivors for Justice! (@NoPulseMuseum) April 9, 2026
We have been against turning a massacre into a tourist attraction. No spectacle. They are building a rainbow-washed LGBTQ death tourism destination. pic.twitter.com/Ka3LDXEmmH
Lack of Transparency in the Pulse Memorial Process
While the memorial proposed by onePulse Foundation would have cost $45 million, the city of Orlando is allocating about $12.5 million for its construction. Of that total, $7.5 million would come from the city of Orlando’s general fund, which is accepting donations from individuals and philanthropic organizations to cover the costs. Orange County, where Orlando is located, would allocate $5 million, and the state of Florida would contribute another $394,321 through a grant agreement.
On May 14, 2026, the city of Orlando said the memorial design was 60% complete. Under the plan, construction of the Pulse memorial would begin in September 2026 and end in late 2027.
The Centro de Periodismo Investigativo requested a breakdown of the expenses the city of Orlando had incurred for the memorial through May 2026. It also requested the amount the city has received in individual and philanthropic donations to finance the project.
The city of Orlando provided only two documents, both of which contained incomplete information. One of them, instead of listing memorial expenses, breaks down the money allocated to repairs at the former Pulse nightclub building. In all, the city of Orlando spent $262,511.41 on work carried out between October 2023 and October 2025. The work included replacing doors and locks, repairing roof leaks and fixing fences around the property.
In March 2026, however, after those repairs, the building was demolished. The city of Orlando had bought the property from its owners for $2.25 million in 2023. The demolition was carried out to make way for the construction of the memorial. The other document the city of Orlando provided to the CPI is a $215,286.69 invoice paid to Gomez Construction for unspecified work.
On March 3, 2025, the city of Orlando issued a request for proposals for the design and construction of the memorial. According to the conceptual design presented by the city of Orlando, the companies working on the memorial’s development are Borrelli+Partners; C&S Companies; Martin Aquatic; L&S Diversified; Local Projects, for exhibition and media design; Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design; Environmental/Medio Ambiente; VHB Civil Engineering; Kaleidoscope Interior Design; and ecoPreserve.
However, the digital contract records for the city of Orlando and Orange County do not show any contracts registered with those companies. In addition to the expense breakdown, the CPI requested the contracts, but they were not provided.
Members of the Memorial Advisory Committee told the CPI that the city of Orlando also has not given them access to financial information about the project.
“There is no justice. Justice has not been done. What has been done is a lot of business,” Aracelis María Jiménez told the CPI in an interview. Jiménez is the mother of Gerardo Ortiz Jiménez, one of the people killed the night of June 12, 2016, at Pulse.
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Ortiz Jiménez, a Dominican national, lived with his father in Carolina, Puerto Rico, before moving to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was visiting Orlando the night of the attack at Pulse. He was 25.
Jiménez is now part of the Pulse Memorial Advisory Committee. The committee was organized in April 2024 by Larry Schooler, a conflict mediation specialist whom the city of Orlando hired for $88,735. The committee is made up of four community leaders with no direct ties to the tragedy and 18 survivors and relatives, including Jiménez.
The community leaders are JahKiya Bell, senior adviser to the president and CEO of Heart of Florida United Way; the Rev. José Rodríguez of Cristo Rey and Jesús de Nazaret Episcopal Church; Joel Junior Morales, foundation manager at Contigo Fund; and Jesse Arias, director of Orlando United Resiliency Services at the LGBT+ Center Orlando.
For Jiménez, 59, the problem with the memorial is not the design but the lack of transparency around the finances, she told the CPI in an interview from the Dominican Republic.
Zachary Blair, a cultural anthropologist and victims’ advocate who is part of Pulse Families and Survivors, said Pulse nightclub has become part of the city of Orlando’s brand and tourism marketing strategy. As part of the memorial’s branding aesthetic, Blair said, the designers propose using national flags to represent all the victims.
“That does not sound like a bad idea, but in practice, they are forcing people to choose a nation to represent them. So, people have to choose between a U.S. flag or a Puerto Rican flag,” Blair told the CPI in an interview. The community organizer added that some victims were biracial and that the use of national flags can create confusion.
“Are they talking about ethnicity, nationality or heritage?” Blair asked.
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“Commemorating events can take a long time,” Andrew Shanken, an architect, urban historian and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the CPI.
As an example, he mentioned the World War II Memorial, inaugurated on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1990, 45 years after the war ended.
“But that is a memorial of enormous proportions. In the case of Pulse, we are talking about something smaller. Ten years is enough time to commemorate, and I think [the memorial for the victims] could have been done faster,” Shanken said.
Shanken also said the circumstances surrounding Pulse are unusual because the memorial was initially expected to be built on the commercial property of a private business, while most memorials are in public spaces. He also stressed that, like onePulse Foundation, which was led by businesspeople with conflicts of interest, the city of Orlando has its own agenda and interests.
“If there is no part of the memorial that can generate revenue for the city, or if it is not part of a tourist itinerary, they may not be able to keep it operating. We live in a world so convinced that capitalism is the only possible system that the profit motive ends up becoming a factor that hinders the process,” said Shanken, author of “The Everyday Life of Memorials.”
The perpetrator of the Pulse massacre, a 29-year-old man named Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, saying he was seeking revenge for U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Syria. The hate crime was investigated by federal agencies as an act of terrorism and described as the worst on U.S. soil since the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001. However, the gunman’s father, Seddique Mir Mateen, told NBC News that the attack at Pulse had nothing to do with religion, but with his son’s homophobia.
This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.
