THE SHOOTER, THE VICTIMS, THE HEROES:
Stalked and vowed to kill ex-girlfriend Gives police anatomy of his massacre
The expelled student charged with slaughtering 17 people at his South Florida high school confessed to cops how he methodically picked off his victims — as classmates revealed Thursday that he was a walking terror who once threatened to kill his ex-girlfriend.
Nikolas Cruz, 19, detailed to police how he walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland with an AR-15 and “began shooting students that he saw in the hallways and on school grounds,” cops said.
He was slapped with 17 counts of murder for Wednesday’s atrocity and was held without bail at a brief court appearance. Police did not provide a motive. “He threatened a lot of people before he was expelled. He’s a dangerous person,” junior Connor Dietrich, 17, told The Post.
“The reason he got expelled was because he was fighting with his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend. He stalked her and threatened her. He was like, ‘ I’m going to kill you,’ and he would say awful things to her and harass her to the point I would walk her to the bus just to make sure she was OK. We all made sure she was never alone.”
Cruz’s confession and violent threats were among several revelations to emerge a day after the nightmare:
The gunman took an Uber to the school campus but after the massacre left on foot as he tried to blend in with his former schoolmates fleeing the bloodbath.
Cruz strolled into a Walmart after the shooting, bought a drink at a Subway sandwich shop and then hid in a McDonald’s. Cops said he sat there for a “short period of time.” He was arrested on the street 40 minutes later.
Former classmates say Cruz wore a “Make America Great Again” hat around campus. “He would degrade Islamic people as terrorists and bombers. I’ve seen him wear a Trump hat,” Ocean Parodie, 17, told the Daily Beast.
Freshman Chris McKenna said he encountered Cruz loading his weapon in a second-floor hallway. “You’d better get out of here,” Cruz said, according to McKenna. “Things are gonna start getting messy.” She immediately fled.
Cruz’s 17 victims included 14 students and three staffers. Two faculty members stepped between the gunman and the students and were hit with bullets meant for their young charges.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office announced Thursday that Cruz detailed to investigators how he went about his shooting spree — which took just six minutes.
He “brought additional loaded magazines to the school campus and kept them hidden in a backpack until he got on campus to begin his assault,” the office said.
As students fled, he decided to discard his rifle and a vest “so he could blend into the crowd” and get away amid the chaos.
Cruz on Thursday made a brief appearance in court, where a judge ordered that he be held without bond.
“You’re charged with some very serious crimes,” Magistrate Court Judge Kim Theresa Mollica told him.
Public defender Melisa McNeill said afterward that Cruz is a “broken human being” who is sad and remorseful.
Beyond his rage over breaking up with his girlfriend, other theories were floated in the wake of the atrocity — including his adoptive mom’s death in November.
Cruz and younger brother Zachary were adopted as infants by Roger and Lynda Cruz, but Roger died of a heart attack a decade ago, leaving Lynda to raise the boys alone, according to family members.
Lynda, 68, last fall checked into a clinic with the flu and was rushed to a hospital, where she died on Nov. 1 of pneumonia, her cousin Kathie Blaine told CNN.
“Lynda was very close to them,” sister-inlaw Barbara Kumbatovic told The Washington Post. “She put a lot of time and effort into those boys, trying to give them a good life and upbringing. I don’t think it [the massacre] had anything to do with his upbringing. It could have been the loss of his mom.”
After his mother’s death, Nikolas and his brother moved in with a family friend, but the troubled teen was not happy there.
So Cruz asked a pal he knew from Douglas HS if he could live with that friend’s family, and they welcomed him in around Thanksgiving, the family’s lawyer, Jim Lewis, told The Sun-Sentinel.
“The family is devastated. They didn’t see this coming. They took him in and it’s a classic case of no good deed goes unpunished,” Lewis said. “He was a little quirky and he was depressed about his mom’s death, but who wouldn’t be?”
The family made Cruz attend adult-education classes and got him a job at a nearby Dollar Tree store.
A short video made by a neighbor shows Cruz brandishing a firearm in a back yard while wearing only underwear, socks and a red baseball cap.
A family friend told the Sun-Sentinel that Cruz had been diagnosed with autism.
And a law-enforcement source told ABC News that Cruz heard voices in his head described as “demons” that gave him instructions on how to pull off the massacre.