Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Gunman opens fire at Florida school
Heavily armed killer is ex-student, officials say
PARKLAND, Fla. — A former student opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle at a Florida high school Wednesday, killing at least 17 people and sending scores of students fleeing into the streets in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since a gunman attacked an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.
The shooter, who was equipped with a gas mask and smoke grenades, set off a fire alarm to draw students out of classrooms shortly before the day ended at one of the state’s largest schools, officials said.
Authorities offered no immediate details on the 19-year-old suspect or any possible motive, except to say that he had been expelled for disciplinary reasons from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which has about 3,200 students.
Parents rushed to the school to find SWAT team members and ambulances surrounding the campus. Live television footage showed emergency workers who appeared to be treating the wounded on sidewalks. Students huddled in horror in their classrooms, with some of them training their cellphones on the carnage, capturing sprawled bodies, screams and gunfire that began with a few shots and then continued with more and more.
“It’s a day that you pray, every day when you get up, that you will never have to see.
It is in front of us. I ask the community for prayers and their support for the children and their families,” said Robert Runcie, superintendent of the school district in Parkland, about an hour’s drive north of Miami.
The suspect was taken into custody without a fight about an hour later in a residential neighborhood about a mile away. He was heavily armed, authorities said.
The Broward County sheriff’s office identified the suspect as Nikolas Cruz.
Officials said the gunman walked the halls of the high school wielding an AR-15 and equipped with multiple magazines of ammunition.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., told reporters that the gunman pulled a fire alarm and then, wearing a gas mask, began tossing smoke bombs and shooting people as they ran through the haze.
Police said the gunman killed a dozen people inside buildings on the school’s sprawling campus, two more on the grounds, and one more on the corner of Pine Island Road as he fled. Two more people died at the hospital. Many underwent surgery at Broward Health hospitals.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said investigators are scrutinizing the suspect’s social media posts and have found material that is “very, very disturbing.” He didn’t elaborate.
Student Daniel Huerfano said he recognized Cruz from an Instagram photo in which Cruz had posed with a gun in front of his face. He recalled that Cruz was shy when he attended the school and remembered seeing him walk around with his lunch bag. Cruz “was that weird kid that you see … like a loner,” he said.
Another former schoolmate recalled Cruz posting on Instagram about killing animals and said he talked of doing target practice in his backyard with a pellet gun.
“Potentially there could have been signs out there. But we didn’t have any warning or phone calls or threats that were made,” Runcie told WSVN-TV.
Jim Gard, a math teacher at the school, told the Miami Herald that Cruz had been identified as a potential threat to fellow students in the past. Gard said he believes that the school administration had sent out an email warning teachers that Cruz had made threats against other teenagers in the past. Another student said Cruz was punished once for having bullet casings at school.
“We were told last year that he wasn’t allowed on campus with a backpack on him,” said Gard, who said Cruz was in his class last year. “There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus.”
After the shots began to ring out Wednesday, Gard said, “Six kids ran back into my room, and I locked the door, turned out the lights and had the kids go to the back of the room. I told the kids to hang in there, it may still be a drill.”
It wasn’t. Freshman Max Charles told The Associated Press that he was in class when he heard five gunshots.
“We were in the corner, away from the windows,” he said. “The teacher locked the door and turned off the light. I thought maybe I could die or something.”
As he was leaving the building, he saw four dead students and one dead teacher. He said he was relieved when he finally found his mother.
“I was happy that I was alive,” he said. “She was crying when she saw me.”
Michael Nembhard was sitting in his garage on a culde-sac when he saw a young man in a burgundy shirt walking down the street. In an instant, a police cruiser pulled up, and officers jumped out with guns drawn.
“All I heard was ‘Get on the ground! Get on the ground!’” Nembhard said. He said he could not see the suspect’s face but that the suspect got on the ground without incident.
The day started normally at the school, which had a morning fire drill. Students were in class around 2:30 p.m. when another alarm sounded.
Noah Parness, a 17-yearold junior, said he and the other students calmly went outside to their fire-drill areas when he suddenly heard popping sounds.
“We saw a bunch of teachers running down the stairway, and then everybody shifted and broke into a sprint,” Parness said. “I hopped a fence.”
Beth Feingold said her daughter, Brittani, sent a text that read, “We’re on code red. I’m fine,” but sent another text shortly afterward saying, “Mom, I’m so scared.” She was later able to escape.
Inside, students heard bangs as the shooter fired. Many of them hid under desks or in closets and barricaded doors.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” one student yelled over and over in one video circulating on social media, as gunfire boomed in the background.
Another video showed police officers bursting into a classroom to evacuate students. “Hands! Hands! Put your hands up!” an officer ordered. “Put your phones away!”
Television footage showed students leaving in a single-file line with their hands over their heads as officers urged them to evacuate quickly.
The massacre called to mind two other mass shootings that have come to be known by the names of the schools: Columbine, the high school outside Denver where 12 students and a teacher were killed in 1999; and Sandy Hook, the elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where 20 students and six adults were shot dead in 2012.
The school fire-alarm tactic used in Wednesday’s shooting harks back to a 1998 shooting in Arkansas.
On March 24, 1998, two students, ages 13 and 11, pulled the fire alarm at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro and shot at students and adults as they exited the building. They killed four classmates and a teacher and injured 10 others.
Since 2000, more than 40 “active shooter” episodes — which the FBI defines on its website as an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area — have been recorded in U.S. schools, according to FBI and news reports. Last month, two 15-year-old students were killed and 18 more people were injured in a school shooting in rural Benton, Ky.
Shootings have become common enough that many schools, including Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, run annual drills in which students practice huddling in classrooms behind locked doors.
Len Murray’s 17-year-old son, a junior at the school, texted his parents: “Mom and Dad, there have been shots fired on campus at school. There are police sirens outside. I’m in the auditorium and the doors are locked.”
A few minutes later, he texted again: “I’m fine.”
Murray said he raced toward the school but was stopped by authorities under a highway overpass within view of the school buildings. He said he told his son to save his battery and stop texting. The boy’s mother told him to turn off his ringer.
As he waited to see his son Wednesday afternoon, Murray said he had just one thought running through his mind: “All I keep thinking about is when I dropped him off this morning. I usually say, ‘I love you,’ and I didn’t this morning. He’s 17, he’s at that age, and I didn’t say it this morning, and I’m just kicking myself right now over and over and over. Say it early and often, I’m telling you.”
The high school was to be closed for the rest of the week.