Shooter warning signs detailed

Cruz looked up how to make bombs at school, showed off animal abuse

Before shooting up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the killer used a school computer to research how to make a nail bomb, according to new documents released Wednesday.

Although Nikolas Cruz did not use a bomb in the attack, his searches in an engineering class caught the attention of a classmate interviewed by investigators after Cruz killed 17 people with an AR-15 rifle on Valentine’s Day.

“He would look up strange things … such as 666,” the unidentified student recalled. “It just made me feel very creeped out and scared.”

The report and others released

Wednesday revealed more warning signs about the troubled Cruz, a former Stoneman Douglas student who had blatantly threatened on social media to become a school shooter — threats the sheriff ’s office and the FBI either dismissed or ignored.

Cruz had a swastika drawn on his backpack and once said he was glad that “all those gay people” were killed at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, the student said.

He also said he felt so sorry for Cruz — who was failing his classes — that he let him cheat off him. “He would get so happy when … he did well. He wasn’t completely gone. He actually still cared.”

The witnesses who spoke to police in the hours and days after the massacre ranged from the people who knew Cruz before the shooting to those who were able to escape his bullets at Stoneman Douglas.

Many witnesses shared a theme: Cruz’s behavior toward animals.

He brought dead birds and squirrels in his lunchbox to show off what he caught and killed. He showed another student a picture of a decapitated cat.

Dana Craig, who was a junior last school year, had known Cruz for years and he once dated her friend, she told investigators.

“We all knew that he wasn’t right,” she said. “We knew he had mental problems. We knew that he … was attacking animals.”

He would shoot squirrels and lizards. He was especially angry at frogs.

“His dog died from eating frogs so he felt like angry at them and he would mainly shoot frogs,” she said.

Craig said her friend broke off a relationship with Cruz because he had been physically abusive.

After Craig told her friend to break off the relationship in 2016, she said Cruz turned on her telling her that “he was going to kill me and rape me and hurt my family.”

They didn’t speak to him again, but Craig said Cruz would “throw things” at the pair during lunch at school.

When the friend started dating someone else, that student started getting online threats from Cruz.

Craig said Cruz would send pictures through Instagram of guns or animals he had killed “as threats.”

Others witnesses said Cruz threatened them directly.

Giovana Cantone told investigators her daughter worked with Cruz at the Dollar Tree on Westview Drive in Parkland last year. When Cantone went to the cashier last summer, Cruz rang her up, and she tried to console him for having been expelled from Stoneman Douglas. She told him her own daughter Ina had switched schools and was doing well, and he could consider a new school or even get his degree online.

“Thanks for the tip,” he told her. “He says ‘I can do that’ … or he says ‘I go shoot them.’”

“Don’t talk like that, that’s not good,” she told him. “I didn’t think he really meant it,” she told investigators.

“I can go shoot them and you know I can shoot you, too,” he told her.

Frightened, Cantone left the store.

She never reported the incident. “I let it go,” she told investigators. “I’m sorry I did that.”

Ina Cantone told investigators that Cruz seemed “off” and made high school girls uncomfortable when they came to the Dollar Tree and he tried to get their phone numbers. He confided to Ina Cantone once that he wanted a relationship because he was lonely.

“He didn’t seem all that there in his head,” she said.

Bruno Cardoso lived directly behind the Cruz family in Parkland when Cruz’s mother was still alive. He told investigators Lynda Cruz was in the backyard, smoking, quite a bit, and Nikolas came outside in his underwear several times for target practice. He shot at cans, bottles and buckets.

He said the Cruz family “always” kept their blinds closed. “Really weird family,” he said.