Shooter confesses as FBI admits failure to act after being alerted
I met him last year, he was in my class at the beginning of the year and when I first met him, I knew that something was off about him and he was kind of weird. Manolo Alvarez
parkland — Nikolas Cruz has confessed to gunning down 17 people at his former high school in Florida, court documents showed on Thursday, as the FBI admitted it had received a tip-off about the 19-year-old gunman yet failed to stop him.
Terrified students hid in closets and under desks on Wednesday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, texting for help.
Cruz has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder, appearing on Thursday afternoon via video link before a judge who ordered him held without bond. More than a dozen other people were injured in the shooting spree. “Today is a day of healing. Today is a day of mourning,” Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said.
“Cruz stated that he was the gunman who entered the school campus armed with a AR-15 and began shooting students that he saw in the hallways and on the school grounds”, court documents showed. Cruz arrived at the school at 2.19pm, authorities said. Less than three minutes later, he started spraying multiple classrooms with bullets. At 2.28pm, he left the campus, according to an official timeline.
Cruz told police that he discarded his rifle and tactical gear in order to blend in with the crowd so he could flee, the documents showed.
After the shooting, he stopped at a Wal-Mart and then McDonald’s, Israel told reporters. He was detained 40 minutes later, after police identified him using school security camera footage. Expelled from school for disciplinary reasons, Cruz was known to be fixated on firearms — and had reportedly been identified as a potential threat to his classmates.
But US authorities themselves were under scrutiny, after the FBI confirmed it was alerted last September to a message posted on YouTube, in which a user named Nikolas Cruz vowed: “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”
In a statement, the FBI said it had carried out “database reviews and other checks” but was unable to identify the person who made the post. A mugshot of Cruz depicts an ordinary-looking young man — cleanly-cut chestnut hair, hazel eyes, his face speckled with freckles. But the information emerging since his attack suggests there were red flags that should have set off danger alerts.
“I met him last year, he was in my class at the beginning of the year and when I first met him, I knew that something was off about him and he was kind of weird,” Manolo Alvarez, 17, said.
Fellow students knew he posted violent messages online, and on Thursday the Anti-Defamation League reported he was a member of a white supremacist group and had taken part in militarystyle training exercises.