‘Royal Oak is Orlando,’ City Commissioner Says

Royal Oak, MI — City Commissioner Jeremy Mahrle opened Monday’s regular meeting with an invocation that remembered the victims of Sunday’s mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub popular among members of the city’s gay community.

In prepared remarks shared with Patch, Mahrle said that he had spent the last 36 hours “trying to make sense and struggling to come to terms with this horrific massacre,” the deadliest mass shooting in the nation’s history.

Forty-nine people died and 53 people were injured in what Mahrle called “an act of hatred and an act of terror targeted specifically at members of the LGBTQ community, simply for celebrating pride in who they are and the obstacles they have overcome.”

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“The scars from this horrific act will be felt for generations,” he said. 

Mahrle said in his remarks that the city of Royal Oak stands in support of and in solidarity with the LGBTQ community.

Also from the prepared remarks:

“Tonight we conduct the business of the people of the city of Royal Oak with this weighing heavy on our hearts. We keep in mind always the values that we collectively hold: the belief that we are stronger when we are together, and indeed stronger than the hate that divides us. The belief that unity and diversity are the pillars of a strong community. The belief that equality, that liberty, that justice are indivisibly rights for all.

“We exert our efforts tonight in those areas and on those things upon which future generations can build with confidence. Let us continue to strive to make a better city, a better community and a better country - a country built on love, not hate.”

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Image credit: Courtesy of the Orlando Police Department