More than 30 knew of Cruz’s ‘troubling’ past

More than 30 people knew about disturbing behavior by Nikolas

Cruz, including displaying guns, threatening to murder his mother and killing animals, but never reported it until after he committed the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

“It’s very troubling behavior, and in many cases it probably should have caused them to report what they heard, saw or learned,” said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, chairman of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, which opened four days of hearings Tuesday at the BB&T Center in Sunrise. “But for a variety of reasons they did not.”

Two students did report Cruz’s disturbing and threatening behavior but said they were brushed off by the school’s administration, according to testimony Tuesday to the commission. A detailed tip to the FBI also went unheeded, and on Tuesday, the parents of one of the murdered students sued the U.S. government over the FBI’s admitted failure.

In the years before the massacre, Cruz reportedly killed a duck with a tire iron, shot squirrels with a pellet gun, killed frogs and decapitated a bird, Pinellas County Sheriff’s Detective

Chris Lyons said in a presentation to the commission, based on statements from students, neighbors and co-workers of Cruz and his mother. Cruz displayed a photo to a student of a decapitated cat.

He repeatedly made racist and anti-gay remarks,using the term “white power” and drawing swastikas on desks and his backpack. He remarked on the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and “said he was glad they killed all those gay people,” the detective said.

A student said he “made bad jokes about Jewish people, Nazis and Hitler and wished all Jews were dead,” he said. One 11th-grader reported that Cruz “told him he did not like black people and would like to shoot them,” he said.

Photos on Cruz’s Instagram account showed guns and knives. They showed a masked Cruz wearing a Make America Great Again hat and camouflage gear.

A bank employee who regularly saw his mother heard her phone conversations, in which Nikolas Cruz screamed that she should kill herself and that he would kill her and burn their house down.

Although his mother, Lynda Cruz, consistently defended him to school authorities, once calling him a “gentle soul,” her conversations with the bank employee told a different story, according to Tuesday’s testimony.

Lynda Cruz described her adopted son as “evil” and manipulative, complaining of being lonely and depressed to elicit sympathy. And she feared him. “If anything happens to me,” she told the bank employee, “it was Nik.”

“The phrase, ‘See something, say something’ – it means something, and it has to be more than a phrase,” Gualtieri said. “We need it to resonate with the public because law enforcement simply cannot be everywhere at the same time, and we have to have the public’s help to effectively do our job.”

But two students did say something in December, 2016, and they said Stoneman Douglas administrators ignored them, according to the Pinellas County detective’s presentation.

One student described a series of menacing actions by Cruz. He smashed a class project. He looked up firearms on a school computer. He posted Instagram photos of firearms. He had heard Cruz brought either a knife or bullets to school. Cruz told him he had two shotguns.

“He said Cruz said that he liked to see people in pain,” the detective said.

The student went with another student to report their concerns to assistant principal Jeff Morford, the detective said.

The student said Morford told them to google the word “autism” and told him Cruz was being taken out of the school by his parent so he shouldn’t worry about it. The other student in the meeting said it had been with Stoneman Douglas Principal Ty Thompson, not Morford, but Gualtieri said the consensus among investigators was that it had been Morford.

The student’s mother went to the school the next day and said she spoke with Stoneman Douglas Principal Ty Thompson, despite the other student’s claim it was Morford, the detective said. She said Thompson told her that if she wasn’t happy with the way the school was run, she could withdraw her son, he said.

Interviewed by the commission’s investigators, both Morford and Thompson deny that the students or one of their mothers had reported Cruz’s behavior to them.

But Gualtieri said the students accounts appeared credible, despite their confusion about who they talked to.

“They both corroborate each other,” he said. “It’s our consensus that they went to Morford, they did not go to Thompson. This is the same instance. You have two kids that are seeing this. They go together, and there’s a lot of corroboration for their version of this.”

Lisa Maxwell, executive director of the Broward Principals and Assistants Association, said she doesn’t know what threats might have been reported to school security officials or the school resource officer. But she said Principal Thompson “unequivocally” denies that any member of the school’s administration was given any warning about Cruz that would cause alarm.

Cruz might have said frightening things to students, but Maxwell said his comments didn’t rise above those of other troubled kids.

“Unfortunately, there’s some very scary kids within the community,” she said, “and they’re numerous and it’s the public school system’s job to educate them. They don’t have a choice.”

“There was no reason to focus on Nik Cruz and zero in like he was capable of this. Had the administration been told specifically that he was threatening to shoot up the school, there would have been a very specific reaction.”

“Kids say crazy things every single day. They threaten to kill other kids. They see things on TV and just blurt it. If you jumped at every utterance made from a kid it would be impossible,” she said.

In a related development, the parents of one of the dead students, Jaime Guttenberg, sued the U.S. government Tuesday over the FBI’s failure to investigate a detailed January 2018 tip warning that Cruz could become a school shooter.

As they were planning their daughter’s funeral, Fred Guttenberg received a text message to call the FBI, according to the family’s lawsuit.

During the call, an FBI agent told him the bureau’s mistakes were about to become public, and he wanted to make sure he heard before that happened.

“Are you telling me that if the FBI did not make a mistake and did their job a month sooner, my daughter would still be alive today?” he asked, according to the suit.

“I’m afraid so, sir,” the agent said

Cruz