Today in History: June 12, Pulse nightclub shooting

Today in History Today is Sunday, June 12, the 163rd day of 2022. There are 202 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History: On June 12, 2016, a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub, a gay establishment in Orlando, Florida, leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded; Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group during a three-hour standoff before being killed in a shootout with police. On this date: In 1630, Englishman John Winthrop, leading a fleet carrying Puritan refugees, arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he became its governor. In 1776, Virginia’s colonial legislature adopted 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, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.) In 1964, South African Black nationalist Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison along with seven other people, including Walter Sisulu, for committing sabotage against the apartheid regime (all were eventually released, Mandela in 1990). In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages. In 1978, David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six ‘œSon of Sam’� .44-caliber killings that terrified New Yorkers. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to ‘œtear down this wall.’� In 1991, Russians went to the polls to elect Boris N. Yeltsin president of their republic. In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were slashed to death outside her Los Angeles home. (O.J. Simpson was later acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial but was eventually held liable in a civil action.) In 2004, former President Ronald Reagan’s body was sealed inside a tomb at his presidential library in Simi Valley, California, following a week of mourning and remembrance by world leaders and regular Americans. In 2020, Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by one of the two white officers who responded after he was found asleep in his car in the drive-thru lane of a Wendy’s restaurant in Atlanta; police body camera video showed Brooks struggling with the officers and grabbing a Taser from one of them, firing it as he fled. (An autopsy found that Brooks had been shot twice in the back. Officer Garrett Rolfe faces charges including murder.) Ten years ago: Democrat Ron Barber, who almost lost his life in the Arizona shooting rampage that seriously wounded former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, won a special election to succeed her. Former mobster Henry Hill, the subject of the movie ‘œGoodfellas,’� died in Los Angeles a day after his 69th birthday. Five years ago: Tens of thousands of protesters held anti-corruption rallies across Russia; more than a thousand were arrested, including opposition leader and protest organizer Alexei Navalny. The Golden State Warriors brought home the NBA championship, defeating the Cleveland Cavaliers 129-120 in Game 5.