GUN-CRAZED FLA. TEEN ‘JOKED’ THAT HE’D SHOOT UP SCHOOL
‘Everyone predicted’ he would be the one to do this
The suspected gunman in Wednesday’s Florida school massacre is a “troubled” former student obsessed with firearms who was once identified as a potential threat to his fellow classmates.
“I stayed clear of him most of the time,” said one teen, who spoke to WSVN-TV but didn’t give his name.
“He’s been a troubled kid, and he’s always had a certain amount of issues going on,” the boy said.
“He shot guns because he felt it gave him, I guess, an exhilarating feeling. He showed me [his guns] personally through his phone.”
The alleged shooter — identified as Nikolas Cruz, 19 — had even “joked” about taking out his schoolmates on several occasions, the student said.
“He played around with the joke multiple times,” the teen said. “You know, he knows the layout of the school. He can actually go ahead and he can pinpoint where all the students would be. He’s been through the drills multiple times.”
Cruz, who was expelled from the school, had been banned from carrying a backpack on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., due to his alleged issues, the Miami Herald reported.
“We were told last year that he wasn’t allowed on campus with a backpack on him,” math teacher Jim Gard, who taught Cruz, told the newspaper.
“There were problems with him last year threatening students,” Gard said. “I guess he was asked to leave campus.”
According to Gard, school officials had sent out an e-mail last year that warned teachers about Cruz and the alleged threats he was making against other students.
Broward County School District Superintendent Robert Runcie, however, says that didn’t happen.
“We received no warnings,” he told reporters Wednesday.
“Potentially, there could have been signs out there,” he said. “But we didn’t have any warning or phone calls or threats that were made.”
Cruz’s classmates insist he was a well-known threat to the school.
“A lot of people were saying it was going to be him,” a student told WFOR-TV.
“A lot of kids threw jokes around saying that he was going to be the one to shoot up the school,” the student said. “It turns out that everyone predicted it. That’s crazy.”
Former classmates said Cruz would flash knives and guns he owned on social media. He appeared to be feuding with people on Instagram, where he posted pics of his “arsenal” and
claimed shooting was “group therapy.”
“Everything he posts is about weapons,” junior Matthew Walker told ABC News. “It’s sick.”
Cruz’s Instagram account, which was confirmed by students, features a number of disturbing images, including posts making fun of Muslims.
The page was taken down after the shooting, but screenshots were sent to The Post on Wednesday night by people who know the young man.
“F--k youuuuuuuuuuuuu allllll,” Cruz wrote in one caption from December 2015.
In other posts, viewed by the Orlando Sentinel and Miami Herald, Cruz appears to talk about background checks and buying a rifle — which he planned to outfit with a scope “for hunting.”
One of the most alarming photos shows a used paper target from a shooting range and the words “Group Therapy” underneath.
“It really does f--king work,” the caption said.
A post from 2015 — featuring a photo definition for the Arabic phrase Allahu
akbar, which means God is Great — appeared to mock Muslims and contained at least one slur.
Investigators have begun “dissecting” Cruz’s social-media pages in search for clues about a potential motive for his Valentine’s Day bloodbath.
Law-enforcement sources told The Post that Cruz was a member of the US Army Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program (JROTC). School officials said he was expelled from Marjory Stoneman for “disciplinary reasons” last year.
One student, Nicholas Coke, told WSVN that Cruz left Stoneman several months ago and moved to north Florida after his mother passed away.
“He had a lot of problems in middle school,” Coke said, describing Cruz as a “loner.” “My time in alternate school, I did not want to be with him at all because I didn’t want to cause any conflict with him because of the impression he gave off.”
One of Cruz’s relatives told ABC News that he was adopted as an infant and later lost both of his adoptive parents. Students said he often complained about being bullied.
“He was super stressed out all the time and talked about guns a lot and tried to hide his face,” fellow Junior ROTC member Giovonni Watford told BuzzFeed News.
Cruz would regularly talk about “how tired he was of everyone picking on him and the staff doing nothing about it,” according to Watford’s brother, Mike. “Something definitely pushed him.”