Cruz texted desire to ‘shoot everybody’

Before committing Florida’s worst school shooting, Nikolas Cruz sent text messages to himself about how he intended to “shoot everybody,” his brother told a detective just hours after the attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Zachary Cruz, 18, said he found the messages while scrolling through his brother’s phone, and although he was startled, he didn’t report them to police because he thought his brother wasn’t serious, according to an interview transcript released Wednesday.

“I’m gonna kill them,” Zachary Cruz recalled reading on his brother’s phone. “I’m gonna go to that school. I’m gonna shoot everybody.”

Those words ended up becoming a horrific reality on Feb. 14 when Nikolas Cruz opened fire and killed 17 people at Stoneman Douglas. The messages on his phone were just one in a string of red flags before the attack.

Zachary Cruz said while speaking under oath that those messages weren’t the only warning signs he saw. His brother also told him in October he would “kill people” if his mother died, according to the transcript.

Their mother — Lynda Cruz — died on Nov. 1 of pneumonia, about three months before the Parkland shooting.

Zachary Cruz told investigators he was “too ignorant to take him serious” and insisted he didn’t know anything about the specifics of the Parkland shooting.

“I was scared because I was like, you know, he might do something,” Zachary Cruz said. “But … I never took it serious because … he would always joke about stuff.”

In the interview, Zachary Cruz detailed his brother’s obsession with guns, telling the detective his brother shot an AR-15 in the family’s garage once and shot a gun out of a window toward palm trees during Hurricane Irma. Nikolas Cruz’s Instagram account name was nikolascruzmakarov, a reference to the Russian Makarov semi-automatic pistol.

The transcripts also provide a glimpse into the time after their mother died when the Cruz brothers lived with family friend Rocxanne Deschamps, 43, in her Lantana home with her son Rock DeschampsLetang.

Nikolas Cruz — even at a young age — would threaten to kill people, said Deschamps-Letang, 23.

“He’s threatened me,” Deschamps-Letang told investigators. “He’s threatened his brother, his mother. He’s threatened many people to kill, kill, kill. … He has fantasies — very, very bad fantasies of killing.”

Rocxanne Deschamps identified Cruz on surveillance footage showing the shooter entering the school. She said he was “the sweetest kid” when he moved into her home but “he switched” and she kicked him out after less than a month.

Zachary Cruz told the detective he didn’t want his brother to die. With a notation that the detective was out of the room, the transcript quoted Zachary Cruz saying — “I still love that fool. Why did you have to do this, dog?”