Tiara Parker once clung to her cousin, who took her last breath in Pulse nightclub’s bathroom stall.

Now, cousin Akyra Monet Murray’s voice looms in her mind.

“‘You always did all that crying,’” Parker remembered Murray saying as they grew up. “‘Turn your pain into gain.’”

And she did.

Today, Parker is an advocate for gun reform. She’s the vice president of VictimsFirst — a nonprofit organization that assists mass shooting survivors and families of victims in the aftermath of tragedy. After a shooting, the 28-year-old lends herself through VictimsFirst to the affected however they see best: She shoulders medical bills and runs grocery store errands.

For a survivor, she said, simple gestures are often most meaningful.

The group that later became VictimsFirst helped Parker after the Pulse massacre when her biggest priorities were scheduling medical appointments and working up the energy to leave the house.

“Jesus, it was so much,” she said. “My brain was all over the place, but the first thing I did need was paying off some stuff that I had from school.”

Today, Parker’s work takes her everywhere: to Colorado Springs, where five people died in a shooting at gay bar Club Q, and to Buffalo, New York, where 10 people died in a supermarket shooting. It also brings her to her own past — and the cousin she left behind in Orlando.

Parker is a Philadelphia native and resides there today. Yet by chance she found herself dancing on Pulse’s Latin night June 12, 2016, with Murray and her friend Patience Carter. She was still 20 and the oldest of the group. Her family vacationed in Orlando annually but had never been to the nightclub before then.

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