Rage, pain fuel gun protest in Florida
State agency found suspect stable despite alarming video, posts
PARKLAND, Fla. — Thousands of angry students, parents, teachers and neighbors of a Florida high school where 17 people were killed demanded on Saturday that immediate action be taken on gun-control legislation, insisting they would not relent until their demands were met.
The rally in downtown Fort Lauderdale gave a political outlet to the growing feelings of rage and mourning sparked by the carnage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Authorities say a former student who had been expelled, had mental health issues and had been reported to law enforcement used a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle to kill students and staff.
‘‘Because of these gun laws, people that I know, people that I love, have died, and I will never be able to see them again,” Delaney Tarr, a student at the school, told the crowd swamping the steps and courtyard at the federal courthouse.
The crowd chanted: “Vote them out!” and held signs calling for action. Some read: “#Never Again,” “#Do something now” and “Don’t Let My Friends Die.”
Student Emma Gonzalez told the crowd politicians should stop tak-
ing donations from the National Rifle Association.
‘‘To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you,” she yelled, and the crowd repeated her.
In a nearly 10-minute address, the Stoneman Douglas High senior led the crowd in chants of “No more BS!”
“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call BS,” she said, in continuing to call out those in power. “Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.”
The rally Saturday came as new details emerged about the suspect, Nikolas Cruz. State investigation
From a mosaic of public records, interviews with friends and family and online interactions, it appears Cruz was unstable and violent to himself and those around him — and that when notified about his threatening behavior, law enforcement did little to stop it.
Cruz’s mother died in November, and his father died years ago.
He reportedly left a suburban Palm Beach County mobile home where he had been staying after his mother’s death because his benefactor gave him an ultimatum: you or the gun.
The Palm Beach Post reports Rocxanne Deschamps said, “He bought a gun and wanted to bring it into my house” in public comments that have since been removed from her Facebook page.
Chad Bennett, a friend of Deschamps’, said Cruz “chose the gun and he left.”
He then went to live with another family.
Earlier, Florida’s child welfare agency investigated after Cruz cut himself in an online video but found him stable, according to state records.
The Florida Department of Children and Families had been alerted to posts on Snapchat of Cruz cutting both his arms and expressing interest in buying a gun, according to the report.
The Department of Children and Families investigated whether Cruz intended to harm himself in September 2016, when he made the alarming social media posts after an argument with his mother. Cruz, who had depression, was upset over a breakup with a girlfriend, his mother, Lynda Cruz, told investigators. The report does not say who called in the complaint.
But the Department of Children and Families report shows that investigators closed the case because they found Cruz was being taken care of by his mother and was receiving mental health counseling. The investigator determined that the “final level of risk is low,” an analysis that even one of Cruz’s counselors at his school believed was premature.
The report is the latest indication that Cruz was repeatedly identified by local and federal agencies as a troubled young man with violent tendencies. The FBI acknowledged Friday that it had failed to investigate a tip called into a hotline last month by a person close to Cruz identifying him as a gun owner intent on killing people, possibly at a school.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said his office had received more than 20 calls about Cruz in the past few years.
Cruz also worried officials at his former school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, who on at least one occasion alerted a mobile crisis unit to get him emergency counseling, according to the state report. ‘A multisystem failure’
Howard Finkelstein, the Broward County public defender, whose office is representing Cruz, said the report was further evidence that Cruz needed serious help long before the shooting, but did not get enough of it.
“This kid exhibited every single known red flag, from cutting animals to having a cache of weapons to disruptive behavior to saying he wanted to be a school shooter,” Finkelstein said. “If this isn’t a person who should have gotten someone’s attention, I don’t know who is. This was a multisystem failure.”
Those failures have led Parkland to respond to the latest mass shooting with a call to activism — angry teachers, parents and teenagers demanding stricter guns laws, more government money for school security and better treatment for mental illness.
“This going to energize a lot of people to vote this year,” said Carl Hiaasen, the best-selling novelist and journalist, who grew up in Plantation, just south of Parkland. “People are angry.”
At a vigil Thursday night in the palm-lined heart of Parkland, people broke into a spontaneous and enraged chant of “No more guns! No more guns!” Many were students, who are organizing on social media and calling for young people to lead the political charge.
Laurie Woodward Garcia, the mother of a 14-year-old girl, echoed many in the crowd at Saturday’s protest, who said they believed that this shooting would lead to change, though so many others had not.
‘‘If there’s something that we can unite on as Democrats and Republicans and Independents, it’s our children. So it will happen,” she said.
Beam Furr, the mayor of Broward County, which includes Parkland, said he was eager to give young people a chance to push for new gun legislation.
“Those students who were at Douglass, they’re good kids, smart students. They don’t want this shooting to be their most enduring memory of high school,” he said. “Several of them have told me they want the memory to be something that they helped change. To let that be their legacy.”
For Gonzalez, the students’ response is about something more fundamental.
‘‘A lot of people are saying that these kids are activists, these kids need to be politicians,” Gonzalez later told a reporter. ‘‘But a lot of us are just other students who figured there’s strength in numbers. And we want to be sure that we end up having our message sent across. And then we can get back to our normal everyday lives, you know.”