FBI didn’t act on ‘killer’ tip
THE FBI said Friday it failed to take any action after a tipster warned last month that Florida madman Nikolas Cruz had a “desire to kill people” and the potential to shoot up a school.
The stunning blunder prompted Florida Gov. Rick Scott to call for the resignation of FBI Director Christopher Wray (photo).
“The FBI’s failure to take action against this killer is unacceptable,” Scott said.
“Seventeen innocent people are dead, and acknowledging a mistake isn’t going to cut it. An apology will never bring these 17 Floridians back to life or comfort the families who are in pain.”
A person close to Cruz contacted the FBI on Jan. 5 expressing concerns about the troubled teen’s “gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting,” the agency said.
The call to the FBI’s official tipline should have been classified as a “potential threat to life” and forwarded to the FBI Miami Field Office.
But no action was taken, the FBI said.
The bureau acknowledged that the “protocols were not followed.”
“The information was not provided to the Miami Field Office, and no further investigation was conducted at that time,” it said in a statement.
Cruz, 19, went on to carry out a bloody rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday — killing 17 people and wounding 14 others.
“Well, they made a big mistake, didn't they?” fumed David Mizen. 55, whose 17-year-old son Lewis survived the massacre.
“Because of that, 17 people aren’t here.”
Lewis Mizen shook his head in disgust when he learned the news.
“That was a huge comment that the FBI missed,” said the senior student.
“He says he wants to be a professional school shooter. How a kid like him gets any kind of weapon is ridiculous.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he ordered his deputy Rod Rosenstein to lead a probe into the FBI’s botched response.
Wray also vowed to investigate what led to the massive misstep.
“We are still investigating the facts,” said Wray.
“I am committed to getting to the bottom of what happened in this particular matter, as well as reviewing our processes for responding to information that we receive from the public.
The January tip wasn’t the first time someone tried to warn the FBI about Cruz.
A Mississippi bail bondsman alerted the feds last September to a disturbing YouTube comment left by a user named “Nikolas Cruz.”
The FBI immediately followed up with the man but the investigation ended after “database reviews” yielded no clues into the identity of the poster, officials said.
NEWS SAYS: Congress must reinstate the ban on assault weapons.
Ayoung madman with an assault rifle he bought legally, without even having to endure a three-day waiting period, just murdered 17 people in a Florida high school. This happened four months after a maniac killed 58 concertgoers. And three months after a killer mowed down 26 parishioners while they prayed in the pews of a Texas church.
Yet while suffering families and friends beg for relief, while millions of others cry out for change, National Rifle Association-programmed automatons in the U.S. Congress refuse even to contemplate the most meaningful way to make those spree killings harder to perpetrate: banning the military-grade weapons all these murderers and many others wielded.
Now, the do-anything-but-the-obvious brigades are seizing on an FBI failure to follow up to a January tip to change the subject. Obviously the fumble, exposed Friday, was a terrible, terrible mistake, one that quite possibly cost lives and must never be repeated.
But it is folly to believe that, even when functioning properly, a large law federal enforcement agency will typically get the necessary warnings to prevent bloodshed. The root problem here is the gun. Republican Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, both lovers of the Second Amendment, supported an assault weapons ban. Ten Republican senators voted for the ban back in 1994, as did many Republican members of the House.
Today, even as eight in 10 Americans, including 70% of Republicans, tell pollsters they want to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, senators and congressmen in the Party of Lincoln are frozen in fear of crossing the gun lobby.
And so, they contort themselves into pretzels: They claim the answer is vastly more mental health services, even as their President proposes slashing mental health funding. They claim we must flood school zones with more armed guards, even as their President calls for a 36% cut in a federal grant program for safer schools.
The answer to this scourge is staring us in the face. We have done it before. It worked.
In the 10-year period before the assault weapons ban of 1994 to 2004, 19 gun massacres (six or more fatalities) took 155 lives.
In the 10 years the ban was in effect, 12 massacres took 89 lives.
In the 10 years after the ban lapsed lapse — a period when overall crime was declining sharply, but the prevalence of AR-15s and their likes was exploding — 34 massacres took 302 lives.
Republicans in Congress have a clear choice: Finally, finally, finally reinstate the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and save American communities from future killing sprees, or admit they are leaving Americans, including schoolchildren, vulnerable to spree killers with military equipment.