A sad and scary day for people living in Florida, we all have to be vigilant and report any suspicious behaviour to the authorities.
Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. hid in closets as a gunman fired a semiautomatic weapon into their classrooms. Seventeen people were killed. »
PARKLAND, Fla. — The suspect in one of the deadliest school shootings in modern American history confessed to police that he “began shooting students that he saw in the hallways and on school grounds” once on campus, according to a police arrest report released Thursday.
Nikolas Cruz, 19, carried a black duffel bag and a black backpack, where he hid loaded magazines, the report said. He arrived at the school in Florida in an Uber at 2:19 p.m. on Wednesday and made his way into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where he pulled out a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle, according to details described by the authorities at a news conference on Thursday.
Mr. Cruz shot people in the hallways and inside five classrooms on the first and second floors of the freshman building. He eventually discarded the rifle, a vest and ammunition in a stairwell, blended in with fleeing students and got away, the authorities said.
After leaving the school, Mr. Cruz walked to a Walmart, and bought a drink at a Subway. He also stopped at a McDonald’s. He was arrested by the police without incident as he walked down a residential street at 3:41 p.m.
“He looked like a typical high school student, and for a quick moment I thought, could this be the person who I need to stop?” Officer Michael Leonard said.
• Mr. Cruz faces 17 counts of premeditated murder — one for each of the people he is accused of killing on Wednesday. He is being held without bond at the main Broward County jail, where he has been placed on suicide watch, according to Gordon Weekes, the chief of the county’s public defenders.
• Mr. Cruz appeared before a judge in Broward County via video conference on Thursday, clad in an orange jumpsuit and shackled around his hands, feet and waist. Asked whether he understood the circumstances in which he found himself, Mr. Cruz whispered two words: “Yes, ma’am.”
“He’s sad. He’s mournful,” his public defender, Melisa McNeill, said after Mr. Cruz’s court appearance. “He is fully aware of what is going on, and he’s just a broken human being.”
• The shooting, captured on cellphone video by terrified students, has renewed a national debate on how to prevent more tragedies. Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said he would meet with state lawmakers to secure more funding for school safety and the treatment of mental illness. “If we have somebody that’s mentally ill, they can’t have access to a gun,” Mr. Scott said.
• President Trump said on Thursday he would make school safety a top priority when he meets with the nation’s governors next month. He also said he planned a visit to the grieving Parkland community. “We are here for you — whatever you need, whatever we can do, to ease your pain,” Mr. Trump said in an address to the nation.
• The F.B.I. said on Thursday it received information last year about a comment made on a YouTube channel which has been attributed to the gunman, but was unable to identify the person.
• The AR-15 rifle used in the attack was purchased legally, at Sunrise Tactical Supply in Florida, according to a federal law enforcement official. The arrest report said Mr. Cruz purchased it in February 2017. “No laws were violated in the procurement of this weapon,” said Peter J. Forcelli, the special agent in charge for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Miami.
In Florida, an AR-15 is easier to buy than a handgun. Check out more on how the AR-15 became one of the weapons of choice for mass killers.
• With the Parkland shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern United States history have come in the last five months. Here is a graphic that records the grim toll of school shootings across the nation.
The mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was one of the deadliest in American history.
An armed police officer at the school did not encounter the gunman during the shooting. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said the school resource officer was on campus but did not run into Mr. Cruz. The gunman arrived during dismissal, when the campus was “fairly open,” according to Robert W. Runcie, the superintendent of the Broward County Public Schools.
Among the dead was a beloved assistant football coach, Aaron Feis, who coached the sheriff’s two sons. Read more about the victims here.
“Our first responders can never unsee what they saw yesterday,” said Frank Babinec, chief of the Coral Springs-Parkland Fire Department.
Dr. Evan Boyar, the director of the department of emergency medicine at Broward Health North, said the hospital received nine of the shooting patients. Four victims remained in critical condition in county hospitals.
The medical professionals at Broward North had prepared for such an event, Dr. Boyar said.
“Nowadays, unfortunately, we do drills for this,” he said. “About nine months ago, we did a drill at our facility specifically for an active shooter.”
The F.B.I. had information about a suspicious comment on YouTube.
Ben Bennight, a bail bondsman in Mississippi, said in an interview that he reported a suspicious comment left on his YouTube channel last fall by a user named “nikolas cruz.”
“I’m going to be a professional school shooter,” the Sept. 24 comment said.
Mr. Bennight took a screenshot of the comment and flagged it to YouTube, which removed the post. Mr. Bennight said he then left a voice mail message at his local F.B.I. field office alerting it to the comment.
Mr. Bennight, 36, said that when he originally reported the comments to the F.B.I., a pair of agents interviewed him the next morning. Mr. Bennight said two F.B.I. agents visited him a few hours after the shooting on Wednesday, spending about 15 to 20 minutes with him. The agents told him they thought the person who posted on his channel might be connected to the Florida shooting because they had the same name.
The F.B.I. on Thursday released a statement that said it received information about a comment made on a YouTube channel in September 2017. “No other information was included in the comment which would indicate a particular time, location, or the true identity of the person who posted the comment,” the statement said. The F.B.I. said it conducted database reviews and other checks, but was unable to further identify the person who posted the comment.
Mr. Bennight did not fault the F.B.I., he said.
“We live in a country where you can’t just lock people away for saying something,” he said. “You can’t just stuff somebody in a black hole because they said something that makes you uncomfortable. I believe the F.B.I. took it seriously. I hope that they followed up.”
The suspect’s Instagram accounts showed guns and hinted at animal cruelty.
Two Instagram accounts that classmates said belonged to Mr. Cruz were filled with images of weaponry, as well as the hats and bandannas he liked to wear to school. Among more innocuous pictures of animals, including a dog and a gecko, was a picture of a slaughtered toad. In response to a comment on that image, Mr. Cruz wrote that toads tended to run away when they saw him, because “I killed a lot of them.”
“I went on a massacre of these things once,” he wrote.
Other posts on the first account, like one captioned “arsenal,” showcased collections of firearms, including what appears to be a Savage Axis bolt-action rifle, a Smith and Wesson M&P15-series rifle, and at least two shotguns. Another picture showed a box containing rifle cartridges for an AR-15 or other similar weapons. Mr. Cruz commented on the post that the box had cost him $30.
It was unclear whether the profile picture for that account, a face nearly entirely covered with a “Make America Great Again” hat and large bandanna, was an image of Mr. Cruz.
A white nationalist group claims the shooting suspect as a member.
The leader of a white nationalist group, Republic of Florida, said on Thursday that Mr. Cruz had also participated in paramilitary drills, according to The Associated Press.
“He acted on his own behalf of what he just did and he’s solely responsible for what he just did,” said the leader, Jordan Jereb.
Mr. Jereb said that his group wants Florida to become its own white ethno-state. He said his group holds “spontaneous random demonstrations” and tries not to participate in the modern world.
Mr. Jereb also said Mr. Cruz had “trouble with a girl” and he believed the timing of the attack, carried out on Valentine’s Day, wasn’t a coincidence.
Sheriff Israel could not confirm any ties Mr. Cruz might have had to white nationalists.
The president calls the gunman ‘mentally disturbed.’
Mr. Trump, in a Twitter post early Thursday, said that people should report anyone behaving like Mr. Cruz to the authorities.
“So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior,” Mr. Trump said. “Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!”
Later, in his televised address, Mr. Trump said he plans to work with state and local leaders to “tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”
The president has blamed mental illness for previous mass shootings, even as one of his first acts as president was to repeal an Obama-era regulation that would add the names of mentally ill Americans registered with the Social Security Administration to the database used for gun purchase background checks.
Without offering any specific proposals, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, said on Thursday, “We’ve got to reverse these trends we’re seeing in these shootings.”
He added that the Justice Department was prepared to enforce existing gun laws and that he met with officials from the Health and Human Services and Education Departments on Thursday to study “the intersection of mental health and criminality and violence.”
Nikolas Cruz. Credit Broward County Jail
“This family did what they thought was right, which was take in a troubled kid and try to help him,” he said.
That included Mr. Lewis encouraging Mr. Cruz to attend adult education courses, work toward his G.E.D., and take a job at a local Dollar Tree store, Mr. Lewis said in a brief interview. The Sneads’ son, a junior, knew Mr. Cruz from Stoneman Douglas High.
As the months wore on, the family thought Mr. Cruz’s mood seemed to be improving. Though they were aware that he had disciplinary problems at his former school and there were some indications that he had been bullied, he had never shared contempt for the school or anyone there with them.
On Wednesday, Mr. Cruz and the Sneads’ son were texting until 2:18 p.m., Mr. Lewis said — about five minutes before the first 911 calls about the shooting.
“But there was nothing crazy in the texts,” Mr. Lewis said.
Here is what we know about Mr. Cruz’s past.
The school community urged action from lawmakers, including tougher gun legislation.
Students and parents in Parkland, an affluent suburb in Florida’s most intensely Democratic county, said a focus from policymakers on treating mental illness was not enough.
Lori Alhadeff, whose daughter Alyssa, 14, was killed, made an emotional plea for action.
“President Trump, we need action, we need change,” she said, the urgency rising in her voice. “Get these guns out of the hands of these young kids and get these guns off the streets.”
“If we’re constantly having our children worried about getting shot at, what are we telling our future?” said David Hogg, 17, a senior, who said two of his 14-year-old sister’s friends were killed. “And that’s what these people are killing, our future.”
Superintendent Runcie did not mince words: “Now is the time for the country to have a real conversation on sensible gun controls in this country,” he said.
Democrats in Congress welcomed a gun control debate.
“At some point, we’ve got to say enough is enough,” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said on the Senate floor.
But in an interview on WIBC radio on Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan said that public policymakers “shouldn’t just knee-jerk before we even have all the facts and the data.” He added, “We need to think less about taking sides and fighting each other politically, and just pulling together.”
‘The shots were something I’ll never forget’
Moises Lobaton, a senior, was in psychology class when gunfire boomed. The students scurried to try to hide as far away from the door as possible.
“There wasn’t enough space behind the desk, so not all of the kids could fit,” he said.
Shots shattered a glass window on the door, injuring at least three of his classmates, including a girl who “wasn’t moving at all.”
Source: BBC
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