Shooting renews questions about preventing school carnage
Families in a South Florida suburb grieved for their slain children Thursday after one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings, while students, Florida’s governor and President Donald Trump asked: How can Americans prevent more carnage in classrooms?
A day after 17 people were massacred at one of the state’s largest high schools, a fuller portrait emerged of the suspect, a loner who had worked at a dollar store, trained with a white nationalist paramilitary group and posted photos of weapons on Instagram. At least one student said classmates joked that Nikolas Cruz would “be the one to shoot up the school.’’
Cruz, a 19-year-old orphan whose mother died last year, was charged with murder Thursday in the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in this sleepy community on the edge of the Everglades. It was the nation’s deadliest school attack since a gunman assaulted an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years ago.
Meanwhile, students struggled to describe the violence that ripped through their classrooms on an ordinary day just before classes were to be dismissed.
Catarina Linden, a 16-yearold sophomore, said she was in an advanced math class Wednesday when the gunfire began.
“He shot the girl next to me,’’ she said, adding that when she finally was able to leave the classroom, the air was foggy with gun smoke. “I stepped on so many shell casings. There were bodies on the ground, and there was blood everywhere.’’
Among the dead: a football coach who also worked as a security guard, a senior who planned to attend Lynn University,
an athletic director who was active in his Roman Catholic church.
Some bodies remained inside the high school Thursday as authorities analyzed the crime scene. Thirteen wounded survivors were still hospitalized, including two in critical condition.
Authorities have not described any specific motive, except to say that Cruz had been kicked out of the high school, which has about 3,000 students and serves an affluent suburb where the median home price is nearly $600,000. Students who knew him described a volatile teenager whose strange behaviour had caused others to end friendships with him.
Cruz was ordered held without bond at a brief court hearing. He wore an orange jumpsuit with his hands cuffed at his waist. His attorney did not contest the order and had her arm around Cruz during
the short appearance.
Afterward, she called him a “broken human being’’ and added that she “had to have the exact same conversation that every parent in Broward County had to have with their children this morning.’’
Wednesday’s shooting was the 17th incident of gunfire at an American school this year. Of the 17 incidents, one involved a suicide, two involved active shooters who killed students, two involved people killed in arguments and three involved people who were shot but survived. Nine involved no injuries at all.
As the criminal case began to take shape, President Donald Trump, in an address to the nation, promised to “tackle the difficult issue of mental health,’’ but avoided any mention of guns. Trump, who owns a private club in Palm Beach, about 40 miles from Parkland, said he planned to visit the
grieving community.
He did not answer shouted questions about guns as he left the room. At the Capitol, the usual divisions over gun laws were evident.
Trump, who did not speak publicly immediately after the shooting, weighed in on Twitter early Thursday, calling the suspect “mentally disturbed’’ and stressing that it was important to “report such instances to authorities, again and again!’’
In the case of Cruz, at least one person did report him.
FBI agent Rob Lasky said the FBI investigated a 2017 Youtube comment that said “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.’’ But the agency could not identify the person who made the comment, which was from an account using the name Nikolas Cruz. It was left on a Youtube video of a vlogger and bail bondsman from Louisiana named Ben Bennight.