Parkland shooter ‘fell off radar’
Panel decries state’s mental health system
When Nikolas Cruz turned 18, he began to exercise adultlevel freedoms in a manner that confounded the abilities of Florida’s underfunded mental health system to intervene.
He bought a gun, despite the objections of mental health counselors, with his mother helping him obtain the necessary state ID, said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, chairman of the state commission investigating the Parkland school shooting.
And he rejected further treatment, falling off the mental health system’s grid until his murderous Feb. 14 attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public
Safety Commission, meeting at the BB&T Center in Sunrise, went into closed session Thursday to review his confidential records from Henderson Behavioral Health, a nonprofit organization that’s Broward’s largest provider of mental health services.
The agency treated Cruz largely in his middle school and high school years, Gualtieri said.
“There was intensive, intensive contact with Henderson,” he said, before the meeting was closed to the public. “But then when he turned 18, he refused services, then he moved, fell off the radar. The intensive services abruptly stopped.”
Henderson had no involvement with Cruz for more than a year before the shooting, the treatment center said in a court filing in a wrongful death suit tied to the shooting.
In addition to the difficulty of treating adults who resist help, the mental health system is hampered by a lack of communication or shared databases among the various agencies that might have an individual in their files, a lack of funds and the absence of a single caseworker to help an individual navigate the system.
Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son Alex was killed in the attack, said the flaws in the mental health system indicated a need for more funding, more communication among agencies and more efforts to follow up with troubled people with a potential for violence, even if they resist treatment upon reaching adulthood.
“I’m sure they’ve been in the system, as this monster was in our system,” he said. “We knew that he was a problem. Obviously this is a gap that we’ve identified. After they turn 18, as a society we cannot abandon them and not, you know, give any more services anymore. It’s unacceptable as a public safety concern. Everybody needs to work together to prevent these tragedies from happening.”
Florida’s mental health system is “painfully fragmented,” underfunded and difficult to access, Miami Circuit Court Judge Steve Leifman, a national expert on mental illness and the criminal justice system, told the commission prior to the meeting’s closure.
Private insurance generally provides limited coverage, pushing people into an already overburdened public system.
The safety net is Florida’s Baker Act, which allows for involuntary hospitalization for up to three days for psychological evaluation if they are an “imminent danger” to themselves or others.
But such evaluations typically last only hours and then people are released back into the community with little follow-up care, said Gualtieri, whose officers spend considerable time taking people to mental hospitals.
Last year, the state conducted nearly 200,000 Baker Act evaluations – a number that has risen steadily over the years.
Although there’s been talk that Cruz should have been taken into custody under the Baker Act, Gualtieri said that would have accomplished nothing.
“So many people think the Baker Act is a magic wand, the Baker Act cures and fixes all,” he said during a break in the meeting Thursday. “The Baker Act doesn’t. The Baker Act is a temporary custody status for assessment. Rarely does the Baker Act result in any treatment. Most people think, well, if Cruz had been Baker acted that this wouldn’t have happened. That is flat-out erroneous.”
Many mentally ill people need extensive “hand holding” after emergency hospitalization to continue to meet with doctors and therapists, he said, but the necessary network of case managers does not widely exist.
Experts told the commission that challenges also exist in the transition from childhood mental health services — which involve more extensive involvement from family members — to the adult system, in which people can exercise their right to refuse to share information or participate in treatment.
Members of the commission appeared to agree that changes were needed so that the system functions more effectively.
“After the fact, everybody knew [Cruz] was going to do it sometime,” said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, a member of the commission. “But none of the dots ever got connected in advance.”