Red flags may have been missed in shooting
Suspect’s Youtube post drew attention of FBI
PARKLAND, Fla. — Months before authorities say Nikolas Cruz walked into his former high school and slaughtered 17 people, the troubled teen began showing what may have been warning signs he was bent on violence.
“Im going to be a professional school shooter,” a Youtube user with the screen name “Nikolas Cruz” posted in September.
The 19-year-old got expelled last year from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for undisclosed disciplinary reasons. And less than a year ago, the former Junior ROTC cadet bought a military-style AR-15 rifle.
As investigators tried to establish the motive for Wednesday’s shooting rampage, students and neighbors portrayed Cruz as an often strange and hostile figure who threatened others, talked about killing animals, and posed with guns in disturbing photos on social media.
“I think everyone had in their minds if anybody was going to do it, it was going to be him,” 17-yearold Dakota Mutchler said after Cruz was identified as the gunman in the nation’s deadliest school shooting in more than five years.
Benjamin Bennight, a Mississippi bail bondsman, was concerned enough after seeing the “professional school shooter” comment on his Youtube channel that he took a screenshot of it on his phone and called the FBI. Two FBI agents visited Bennight the next day.
But the FBI said it never spoke to the Florida teen.
“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,” said Brett Carr, a spokesman for the FBI office in Jackson, Mississippi. “The FBI conducted database reviews and other checks but was unable to further identify the person who posted the comment.”
Cruz’s mother, Lynda Cruz, died of pneumonia Nov. 1, and her husband died of a heart attack years ago, neighbors, friends and family members told the Sun Sentinel. The couple had adopted Nikolas and his biological brother.
Around Thanksgiving, Nikolas Cruz moved in with a friend’s family.
Lawyer Jim Lewis, who represents but did not identify the family, said they knew that Cruz owned the AR-15 but made him keep it locked up in a cabinet and never saw him go to a shooting range with it. He did have the key, however.
Cruz passed a background check and legally purchased the semiautomatic rifle from a dealer in Florida in February 2017, authorities said.
The family is devastated and shocked, Lewis said. During the three months Cruz lived there, he was respectful and quiet but also sad over his mother’s death, the lawyer told the AP.
“No indication that anything severe like this was wrong,” Lewis said. “Just a mildly troubled kid who’d lost his mom. … He totally kept this from everybody.”
Cruz’s attorney, Melisa Mcneill, said after a court hearing Thursday on the murder charges against the young man that Cruz was sad and remorseful and “just a broken human being.”
Cruz was getting treatment at a mental health clinic for a while but hadn’t been there for more than a year, Broward County Mayor Beam Furr told CNN.