The City of Orlando Is Erasing Christopher Leinonen — And His Mother Needs Your Help

Pulse Families and Survivors for Justice
7 days ago
10 min read

It has been ten years since a gunman walked into the Pulse nightclub on June 12, 2016, and murdered 49 people. Ten years since Christine Leinonen lost her son, Christopher Andrew Leinonen.

Ten years.

And the City of Orlando is still finding new ways to harm Christine and exploit her son's murder.

Who Was Christopher Andrew Leinonen?

His friends called him Drew.

From birth, he was easy-going, fun, and happy. He was the kind of person who lit up a room just by walking into it — he enjoyed meeting new people and making friends, the epitome of a social butterfly.

But Drew wasn't just charming. He was deeply, quietly good. He was very caring and considerate and had a spirit of helping others — so much so that in high school, a school counselor recognized this spirit and nominated him for the Anne Frank Humanitarian Award for standing up for gay and lesbian teens at his school.

He turned that goodness into a vocation. He earned a bachelor's and master's degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Central Florida, then went to work at a mental health facility helping diagnose people experiencing homelessness and living with mental illness. He eventually became a licensed mental health counselor working in an Orlando Hospital emergency room. He spent his days — the last days of his short life — trying to help people at their most broken.

He loved Orlando and chose to build his life there. Christine, a single mom, moved to be near him while he was in school. They were close in the way only a mother and an only child can be.

Christopher was also biracial. He carried two heritages in his blood and in his face. His Finnish surname — Leinonen — was given to him by his mother's family, a name that announced his Nordic roots every time someone said it aloud. His Japanese heritage lived in his features, visible to everyone who looked at him, a testament to his father's bloodline and the Japanese-American identity he carried with pride.

He was not half of one thing. He was the whole of two things. And he was murdered on an unpermitted dancefloor in Orlando on June 12, 2016 — a dancefloor that the City asked PULSE owner Rosario Poma to remove, in a building riddled with a long list of code violations that the City concealed from families until after the statute of limitations had run.

Christopher's blood was shed on that floor. And rather than reckon with what that floor represents, the City of Orlando removed pieces of it from the building, designated them "historical artifacts," and is now planning to inlay these pieces into the grounds of the proposed memorial.

This is a decision that appeals to the ghoulish instinct that has always drawn certain people to places where masses of people were violently murdered.

By salvaging the wooden slats of a once blood-soaked, unpermitted dancefloor and repurposing them as part of the memorial's centerpiece, Orlando is not building a monument to the 49 people who were murdered. It is building a monument to what was done to them.

What the City is creating is a rainbow-washed spectacle — where the festive colors of LGBTQ+ pride serve as a wrapper around something fundamentally grotesque: tourists walking over the preserved remnants of a floor where 20 of the 49 took their last breaths as they stroll to a visitor's center to view more items removed from the building.

Imagine if this was proposed this in Uvalde. Imagine pulling up the floorboards of Robb Elementary — the classroom where 19 children and two teachers were massacred — and inlaying them into a visitor pavilion for tourists to walk over. The outrage would be immediate and deafening. No politician would dare suggest it. No city government would survive it.

Imagine if they proposed this to the families of Club Q in Colorado Springs. Imagine telling those survivors — people who are still living with the trauma of that night — that the nightclub where their community was attacked would become an attraction with a visitor center; that lighting fixtures and the cash registers were being preserved for future exhibition.

It would never happen.

And the reason it is happening in Orlando, to us, is not a mystery.

Orlando is billed as the tourist capital of the world. Tourism is not just part of the local economy — it is the local economy. Theme parks. Conventions. Visitors by the tens of millions every year. In that context, a mass shooting site is not a tragedy to be solemnly set apart from commerce. It is an asset to be developed. The rainbow flag makes it palatable. The visitor pavilion makes it appealing.

Remember, City officials did not have a single moral objection to PULSE owner Barbara Poma's failed efforts to turn the massacre into a $100M memorial-museum campus and gentrification project. In fact, Mayor Buddy Dyer and other city officials proudly supported that scam.

For the City of Orlando, the PULSE massacre can no longer be a stain on its image and global brand. So, it has decided to clean off the bloodstained floor, varnish it, and invite the world to walk across it.

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A Simple Request. A Brutal Refusal.

Long marketed as one of the few liberal cities in a MAGA-red, Republican state, for decades, Orlando has long leveraged diversity as its primary marketing tool. The PULSE memorial has become the latest expression of that strategy — another prop for burnishing the City's progressive brand, rather than a solemn reckoning with the worst mass shooting ever to target LGBTQ+, Black, and Latinx people in the history of the United States.

The memorial's design makes this cynicism visible. It is awash in rainbow colors — an aesthetic choice that signals LGBTQ+ welcome and attracts queer tourism dollars, even as violent crimes against LGBTQ people continue to occur regularly on the city's streets.

Alongside the rainbow imagery, the City's designers incorporated multinational flags throughout the memorial — most prominently in the front "Prism Plaza," where they surround an enormous PULSE tower. The effect is a curated image of multicultural harmony, branded around the name and identity of a derelict nightclub that its owners marketed to the world as a safe space — even as it operated in flagrant violation of basic safety codes, with blocked exits, illegally walled-over windows, and unpermitted renovations that directly hindered the escape and rescue of the people who were trapped inside.

That lie — the nightclub as safe space — is a fitting symbol for the City that built its memorial around it. Orlando is not the progressive, welcoming city its marketing claims. While other municipalities across the country refused to participate in the federal government's mass deportation campaigns, Orlando's leaders chose cooperation and complacency.

As the same Latino populations to be represented by the PULSE memorial flags were rounded up, jailed, placed in concentration camps, and deported, local leaders declined to fight back against Florida's cascade of violently anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ state policies. And all of this unfolded after decades of the Dyer administration running western portions of the city—home to its most vulnerable, most marginalized Black communities—like a plantation.

These are the same communities the City is now exploiting through PULSE victims and the PULSE memorial to feign and market diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion—even as it continues to do immense and irreparable harm to all of us.

The flags to be raised at the front of the memorial do not represent what Orlando is. They represent what Orlando wants tourists to believe it is.

Within this same logic and design framework, the City made another consequential design decision: it asked each victim's family to select a single national flag to represent their murdered loved one, to be displayed on one side of the memorial columns designated for that person. One flag. One person. One side of a column.

This was presented as a gesture of cultural recognition. In reality, it is an ill-conceived oversimplification of human identity—a bureaucratic reduction of complex, layered, irreducible lives into a single national symbol.

That became undeniable the moment City officials told Christine Leinonen she could only pick one flag to represent her son Christopher.

The City of Orlando forced a grieving mother to choose which half of her son's identity would be honored — and which half would be erased — from a permanent public memorial bearing his name. She pleaded with the City to allow her son to have two flags, the Finnish flag and the Japanese flag, on his side of the column. They refused and told her that she must pick one.

After multiple phone conversations with a city employee, Christine sent a detailed, formal letter on March 28, 2026, requesting that Christopher be represented by both the Finnish and Japanese flags, accurately reflecting his full identity. She asked for a written explanation of the City's one-flag policy. She asked whether any exceptions had been granted. She asked — as she has been forced to ask, again and again, for a decade — for basic dignity from a city that claims to honor her son.

The City never responded.

On April 8, 2026, victim advocate Dr. Zachary Blair followed up with City and County officials directly, writing:

"Forcing Christine to choose which half of her son's identity your memorial will honor is not a neutral design decision — it is an act of ongoing harm. This memorial is supposed to be for her and the other 49 families. Compelling a grieving mother to erase part of who her murdered child was, in order to be accommodated by the City's memorial design choices, is revictimization. It should stop."

Still no response.

This Is Not Just Wrong. It May Be Illegal.

The City's refusal to allow two flags is not merely callous. It may carry serious legal consequences.

When the City chose to use national flags as a representational element of the memorial, it created a classification system — a government-administered framework for how victims are publicly identified by their heritage. Once the City made that choice, the Constitution required it to administer that system fairly, rationally, and consistently.

It has not done so. By forcing biracial and multi-ethnic victims to be represented by only one component of their identity while monoracial victims face no such impossible choice, the City has created a system that imposes a disparate burden on families of victims with complex, multi-ethnic backgrounds. This raises serious concerns under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and may implicate federal civil rights law.

As Dr. Blair wrote to City officials: "The City's one-flag rule and its application to families of bi-racial and multi-ethnic victims creates a disparate impact that penalizes multi-ethnic identity."

The City was warned. In writing. It has chosen to say nothing.

Ten Years of Being Silenced, Excluded, and Harmed

What is happening to Christine right now is not new. It is the continuation of a decade-long pattern.

For years, the City of Orlando supported the onePULSE Foundation — an organization that consistently prioritized institutional fundraising, political relationships, and real estate development over the needs of survivors and families. Our families were told to be patient. To trust the process. To accept whatever the Foundation decided. When we pushed back, we were managed, shamed, and silenced. When we asked questions, we were ignored or given platitudes.

Christine pushed back. She asked questions. And she paid for it.

When the City finally dissolved the Foundation and took direct control of the memorial process, survivors and families hoped things would change. They did not.

Christine applied to serve on the City's own Pulse Memorial Advisory Committee — the body charged with guiding how her son and 48 others would be memorialized forever. The City rejected her application. She was excluded from the table where decisions about Christopher's legacy were being made.

When Christine appeared at public comment sessions to speak, she was silenced by a paid moderator — Larry Schooler, brought in from Texas — and consistently restricted to three-minute time slots. Three minutes to speak about her murdered son.

She was excluded from the design process of not one, but two proposed memorials. She was silenced in public meetings. And now, after all of that, the City is telling her that the memorial it built without her input doesn't have room for both of her son's flags.

As Christine herself wrote:

"Furthermore for the City to archive the very dancefloor that my son died on. And lost every ounce of that Japanese blood on. But not let the world know that a Japanese American was killed in that brutal terrorist attack on 6.12.2016. Or else he has to give up his Finnish identity? This is unconscionable."

She is right. It is unconscionable.

What We Are Asking You To Do

The City of Orlando will not do the right thing unless it is forced to and its officials are publicly shamed. We have seen that play out for a decade. The only thing that has ever moved this City is public pressure, and we are asking you to help create it.

Here is what you can do right now:

Contact Mayor Buddy Dyer and your City Council Commissioner and demand that Christopher Andrew Leinonen be represented by both the Finnish flag and the Japanese flag on his designated space in the City's PULSE memorial. Tell them that one flag is not enough. Tell them that erasing half of a murdered man's identity from a permanent public memorial is not acceptable. Tell them that Christine Leinonen has waited ten years and she deserves better than silence.

Mayor Buddy Dyer: buddy.dyer@orlando.gov

City Commissioners:

Patty Sheehan (District 4): patty.sheehan@orlando.gov
Shan Rose (District 3): shan.rose@orlando.gov
Tom Keen (District 1): tom.keen@orlando.gov
Tony Ortiz (District 2): tony.ortiz@orlando.gov
Regina Hill (District 5): regina.hill@orlando.gov
Bakari Burns (District 6): bakari.burns@orlando.gov

You can also call the Mayor's office at (407) 246-2221.

When you write or call, say this:

"I am calling to demand that the City of Orlando honor Christopher Andrew Leinonen's full biracial identity by allowing both the Finnish flag and the Japanese flag to represent him on the Pulse Memorial. One flag is not enough. His mother, Christine Leinonen, has asked for this. The City should say yes."

The Documents

Below are the documents at the center of this fight. Read Christine's own words. Read the advocacy letter sent to City and County officials on her behalf. Then contact the City and demand better.

Christine Leinonen's email to City officials, March 28, 2026: