Between the birthday greetings he got as he woke up, visual artist ChadMichael Morrisette said his heart broke for what he saw on the news Sunday morning as details emerged about the mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando.
"This affected me so much. I wanted people to see as the biggest shooting in American history, what that might look like, and I have the ability to show them that," he said.
It was his call to action. His vision was to show people the horror of what the aftermath of a shooting of that magnitude would look like.
Morrisette created a dramatic representation of the carnage inside Pulse nightclub, with 50 mannequins on the roof of his West Hollywood home.
"I put 50 bodies on the roof of my house so that people could drive by and see what 50 human bodies looks like. Piled up," he said of the installation.
No two mannequins' expressions are the same, no positions are the same. It is the visual of what first responders must have seen inside that nightclub, where Omar Mateen killed at least 49 people and wounded 53 more.
"The bodies are still in there. Right now. They’re still in there," Morrisette said Sunday night. "This is exactly what they’re walking into."
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His art piece is titled "No One Is Safe," and he is calling on lawmakers to change that.
"It doesn’t matter if it’s a church or a movie theater or a gay club or an elementary school. All of us at this point should be able to relate to it," Morrisette said.
"I don’t care what you say about all this we cannot have 50 Americans killed in a nightclub and continue to do nothing about it."