FBI provides no answers on Parkland school shooter tips

People thought they would finally find out Friday why the FBI dropped the ball on tips about Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz.

They learned nothing. The FBI didn’t attend a meeting of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, and the information the agency promised to send never showed up.

Commission members urged the panel not to let the FBI off the hook. If the FBI had done everything right, it would have attended the meeting “with a band” instead of avoiding spotlight, said commission member Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd.

“To not stand up and take your medicine is not acceptable,” he said.

The father of victim Gina Montalto, Tony, said the FBI initially told families during a conference call that it had fumbled the Parkland tips. But a request to sit down with the agency has gone unheeded for months.

“I think they need to be a little more responsive,” he said.

The FBI has acknowedlged it mishandled two ominous tips to its national call center about Nikolas Cruz, the teenager who later gunned down Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, chairman of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s Public Safety Commission, speaks to reporters Friday.

17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with an AR-15 rifle.

Both tips suggested that Cruz was a school shooter in the making, but neither was sent to agents in South Florida to check out.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel reported in August that the FBI call center has long depended on lowpaid, overworked employees who were evaluated partly on how quickly they disposed of tips from callers.

Figuring out how agents made decisions, including the botched Cruz case, has been impossible because no one was required to document precisely what information was considered.

With Cruz, the confusion was compounded because the call-taker and her supervisor give conflicting accounts of why one tip was mishandled — each pointing the finger at the other.

Senior FBI officials called the agency’s actions “serious, grave errors,” but they considered the mistakes “judgment errors” and refused to say whether anyone was disciplined.

The FBI had told Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, the commission chairman, it would not speak at the meeting, but it promised to send “a packet of information.” The commission was supposed to “discuss what they were sending.”

Gualtieri said the agency told him it mailed information Nov. 9, but the information never arrived.