Dangerous teen, cops knew well

THEY HAD no clue.

The family that school shooter Nikolas Cruz was living with before he slaughtered 17 innocents can’t fathom how the teenager became a killer.

“We had this monster living under our roof and we didn’t know,” Kimberly Snead told the South Florida Sun Sentinel Saturday. “We didn’t see this side of him.”

“Everything everybody seems to know, we didn’t know,” her husband, James Snead said. “It’s as simple as that.”

The Sneads took in Cruz, who was friends with their son, last Thanksgiving.

They found the orphaned teen immature and quirky: he went to bed at 8 p.m. and had strange eating habits — he once snuck a chocolate chip cookie into a steak sandwich — but nothing that remotely rose to Wednesday’s deadly crescendo.

The Sneads say they were unaware of the red flags apparently missed by local police, Florida’s child welfare agency and a private Instagram group chat.

“I hate jews, n-----s, immigrants,” the hate-fueled Cruz posted after joining the Instagram group in August 2017.

Newly released Parkland Police reports depicted Cruz as a threat to his mother and himself.

And records from the state child welfare agency show that Cruz posted a Snapchat video where he was seen slicing into his own arms.

According to the Sun-Sentinel, a caller to the agency’s child abuse hotline reported the cutting and left an ominous message. “Mr. Cruz plans to go out and buy a gun,” the caller said. “It is unknown what he is buying the gun for.”

A subsequent investigation led to the conclusion that Cruz was “stable enough not to be hospitalized,” according to a November 2016 Department of Children and Families report.

Police reports obtained by CNN repeated incidents of bizarre behavior from Cruz between 2011 and 2016 with references to the teen as a “mentally ill person.”