South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
FBI meets with Parkland families
Official was ‘apologetic’ and ‘appalled’ over bungled tips
The FBI called grieving families two days after the Feb. 14 Parkland massacre, compounding their pain by informing them the agency had bungled tips about the school shooter who killed 17. And then, for nearly 10 months, silence.
Until last weekend, when relatives of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High shooting victims finally got the chance to confront the federal agency tasked with inves- tigating threats and protecting the public. Skeptical and weary, the families braced for a potentially explosive meeting they first requested in June.
For two hours on Dec. 8, FBI deputy director David Bowdich — the bureau’s second-ranking official after director Christopher Wray — met with families at the South Florida field office in Miramar. Attendees say the session was a heartfelt back-and-forth. Bowdich listened to families’
concerns, answered questions and laid out steps the FBI has taken to prevent the same mistakes from happening again.
“They were apologetic at times,” said Tony Montalto, whose 14-year-old daughter Gina was killed. “But there’s an open wound for all of us.”
Some of the 10 families that attended the meeting were upset the FBI has been reluctant to share information with Congressional and Florida investigative committees. Some were upset the bureau had ignored their request to meet for so long. One family in attendance filed a negligence lawsuit against the FBI in November.
All were enraged about one of the biggest blunders leading up to the tragedy, a detailed tip to the FBI about shooter Nikolas Cruz on Jan. 5 that was discarded.
Bowdich told the families that he “was appalled” the first time he listened to a tape of the Jan. 5 tip, made to the FBI’s national call center in West Virginia. The anonymous, 14-minute call warned that Cruz was “about to explode” and could go into a school and “start shooting it up.” That tip was not forwarded to the FBI’s South Florida field office for further investigation, not even after Cruz’s name was linked to an earlier tip. In Sept. 2017, the FBI was alerted to a comment a YouTube user named “nikolas cruz” posted to a video, saying that he was “going to be a professional school shooter.”
“[Bowdich] said, ‘No excuses,’ and he said he was sorry that it wasn’t handled properly,” said Gena Hoyer, whose 15-year-old son Luke was killed. “This was a hard meeting, but it was also a different kind of meeting for us. We showed up, and they took responsibility. The FBI admitted wrongdoing, and they did apologize.”
And for the first time, the agency divulged the punishment doled out to two employees at the call center who botched the tip 40 days before the shooting. The worker who took the call “no longer works for the agency,” families were told, and the supervising agent who did not forward the tip to South Florida agents was “severely disciplined.”
When relatives pressed Bowdich what that meant, the group was told he could have been demoted or suspended without pay.
“They weren’t specific, they just gave a list of things,” said Debbi Hixon, wife of slain athletic director Chris Hixon.
Bowdich also detailed changes that have been made. Besides hiring more workers and supervisors for the call center, which averages more than 3,500 tips daily, new protocol mandates supervisors listen to tapes of calls that involve potential loss of life.
“The supervisor never listened to the call,” Hoyer said.
Said Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was killed: “They failed terribly. They had the most specific, detailed, credible intelligence before that day and they did not act on it. There was a lot of remorse [at the meeting], but the reality is they failed.”
The South Florida Sun Sentinel interviewed relatives from six of 10 families who attended the meeting. A FBI spokesman in Miramar referred questions about the meeting to the bureau’s national press office in Washington. In a statement sent Saturday, the FBI said, “The FBI deputy director met with the Parkland victim families on Dec. 8 to advise them of new procedures and improvements [with the Public Access Line] … Additional mandatory training has been implemented, including specific guidance for handling threats to life and school violence. … The FBI will continue to review its processes and procedures for receiving and evaluating tip information to ensure the information is effectively and efficiently handled.”
“It doesn’t bring my son back, or any of the other 16 victims back, but I appreciated [the meeting],” said Linda Beigel Schulman, mother of slain geography teacher Scott Beigel. “You could tell Bowdich has been living and breathing this since the shooting. He was empathetic and human, not like a bureaucrat.” She said the families sat in two rows in a semicircle around Bowdich, with FBI agents and staffers sitting in back. She said when Bowdich didn’t know the answer to a question, he’d direct a staffer to find the information.
“They admitted they made mistakes, and they were human mistakes, not malicious,” Hixon said. “But they told us a lot of things that were already known. I really don’t know what the purpose was, other than for them to clear their conscience.”
Hixon said she was upset because her invitation to the meeting was her first contact with the FBI since the night of the shooting. She was not contacted for the Feb. 16 conference call that alerted the families that the FBI had received tips about Cruz and failed to act on them. When that call came, Guttenberg said he was at a funeral home selecting a casket for his daughter, Jaime.
The FBI went public with the information later that day, with a statement from Wray saying, “We have spoken with victims and families, and deeply regret the additional pain this causes.”
Hixon said the FBI’s slights continued at the meeting when Bowdich kept referring to “parents and kids.” “I had to interrupt and say I’m a wife and my husband was an adult,” Hixon said. “People forget that teachers and coaches lost their lives, too.”
The FBI went silent with families after the Feb. 16 conference call. FBI officials have given testimony at Congressional hearings looking into the failure throughout the year, and the transcript of the botched Jan. 5 call was obtained by several media outlets including the South Florida Sun Sentinel in late February. Many parents could not bear to read it.
Gena Hoyer did, and she brought a printout of the transcript to the meeting. She said she pressed Bowdich on some of the tipster’s more damning details, including the death of Cruz’s mother, his proclivity to torture animals, gun ownership and disturbing social media posts.
Montalto, who heads Stand With Parkland, a victims’ family group, wrote the FBI requesting a meeting in June. In July, Max Schachter briefly met FBI Director Wray at a security conference in Hollywood. Schachter, whose son Alex was killed in the shooting, sits on the state commission investigating the massacre.
In November, Fred Guttenberg’s family filed a federal civil suit against the FBI claiming negligence. Other suits against the FBI are in the works, including from April and Phil Schentrup, p a re n t s o f mu rd e re d 16-year-old honors student Carmen Schentrup.
Relatives say Schachter worked behind the scenes to keep pressing for the meeting. In early December, the email invitations went out. Only immediate relatives were allowed. No friends, no lawyers. The lone exception made was for the parents of Peter Wang, who don’t speak English. They were allowed to bring a Mandarin-speaking interpreter.
Why now? Montalto and other relatives say the FBI acts at its own deliberate pace, and that the agency wanted to conclude its internal investigation and make sure it had all the facts before meeting. Beigel Schulman said Bowdich allowed relatives to interrupt with questions during his presentation, and that he stuck around to speak with families one-on-one afterward.
“I expected more of a whitewashing, so I was satisfied,” said Beigel Schulman, who flew in from New York with her husband, Michael. “I can’t use the word happy, because none of us are happy anymore.”
Some families did not attend the meeting. Andrew Pollack, whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow was killed, said, “What’s the point? It’s just hearing from more people who failed. I want accountability. Unless they brought the woman who took that call and the supervisor to apologize and explain to us what happened, it’s meaningless.”
Manuel Oliver, whose 17-year-old son Joaquin was killed, said, “The FBI meeting and all these things where everybody gets together, it’s bulls---. It’s more of the same and another one of those traditions we want to break. I’m not playing that game. Unless we’re talking about gun safety and how we’re going to change this country’s gun culture, I’m not interested.”
Lori Alhadeff, elected to the Broward School Board this year after the death of her daughter Alyssa, also skipped the meeting.
“The trauma is very painful to relive, and unfortunately the outcome is still the same,” Alhadeff said. She said she prefers to focus on the future and is working on changes that can make schools safer.
And, Alhadeff said, she is still stung by the way an FBI agent notified her of her daughter’s death, at 2:30 a.m., 12 hours after the shooting in a hotel conference room. “First they only wanted to talk to my husband and not me,” Alhadeff said. “And then they told me that my daughter’s face was shot off. That was a lie. It was not true …I think it’s important they learn from their mistakes.”