Inside the final shootout between police and Orlando shooter
ORLANDO -- Police Chief John Mina on Monday filled in what we didn't know about the assault on the Pulse nightclub, and the police counter attack against the killer Omar Mateen.
Mateen opened fire inside the club just after 2 a.m. A uniformed off-duty officer, working as a bouncer, returned fire and called for back up. Two officers arrived, and all three moved in aggressively.
Orlando police are trained to attack active shooters immediately, rather than wait for a SWAT team.
"Because of that exchange of gunfire, that forced the suspect to retreat backwards, stop shooting and retreat backwards into the bathroom where he held some people hostage," Mina told CBS News' Scott Pelley.
Forcing Mateen to retreat gave countless people a chance to escape. He had about four or five hostages in the restroom. But others were hiding in the club, 15 in a different restroom. Officers outside the building removed an air conditioning unit and several trapped victims crawled through the hole.
The gunman called 911, pledged allegiance to ISIS, then spoke in a foreign language the police could not identify. Mateen hung up, but now the police had his phone number.
"So our main focus was in trying to get him ... we want to make this a peaceful resolution, and you could tell he wasn't interested in that -- didn't talk much. Then we lost contact with him," Mina said.
"How did you proceed from there?" Pelley asked.
"We were receiving text messages and information from officers and people inside the club that he had explosives, that he was going to start putting on bomb vests on four people," Mina explained.
"And so we believed, based on everything we had, loss of life was imminent. So we set up an explosive breach on the other bathroom where the other 15 people were."
But the police explosives didn't break through, so they rammed the wall with an armored car. The 15 ran out.
The SWAT team was preparing to enter the same breach to assault the gunman, but before they had a chance, Mateen left his hostages and came out of the breach -- shooting.
There are bullet holes all over the wall where police cut Mateen down.
It turned out he had no explosives.