Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
More Parkland parents, students sue FBI
Lawsuits filed this week say the agency botched tips about the school shooter
Eight sets of grieving parents, and seven current or former students, are suing the FBI over botched tips about the Parkland shooter leading up to the 2018 massacre.
Andrew Pollack and Shara Kaplan, the parents of Meadow Pollack, who was 17 when she was shot nine times during the massacre, filed their lawsuit against the FBI on Wednesday in Fort Lauderdale federal court.
On Thursday evening, the parents of Alyssa Alhadef, Alex Schachter, Nicholas Dworet, Gina Montalto and Peter Wang, all students who died in the shooting, filed separate lawsuits against the law enforcement agency. Linda Beigal Schulman, the
mother of Coach Scott J. Beigal, who was also killed in the massacre, filed a seperate suit.
The grieving families were joined in their legal actions by seven former or current Marjory Stoneman Douglas High students injured in the shooting, who also all filed individual lawsuits against the FBI on Thursday.
The flurry of lawsuits is likely prompted by the end of a two-year window during which those injured or killed have the ability to sue the government.
All of the lawsuits resemble the ones filed by the parents of Jaime Guttenberg and Carmen Schentrup in November 2018. Guttenberg
and Schentrup also were killed in the school shooting.
Their parents sued the FBI, saying the agency was liable for their deaths.
The 15 lawsuits filed this week are similar. They argue that the FBI bears responsibility for the deaths, given that it was sitting on two separate tips about Nikolas Cruz’s violent behavior, mental instability and large cache of firearms.
According to the complaint, the FBI received its first tip about Cruz in October 2017, five months before the shooting.
A Mississippi bail bondsman with a Youtube channel received a message from Cruz that read, “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”
The affidavit states that the bail bondsman was interviewed by two FBI agents shortly afterward, but the FBI file on Cruz was closed out by October 2019.
Then, just one month before the shooting, the FBI’s tip line received a much more substantial and specific warning about Cruz from an anonymous caller.
“I know he’s going to explode,” the anonymous caller told the FBI tip line operator, before going into a detailed account of Cruz’s disturbing social media activity, in which the young man displayed “all kinds of rifles” and posted photographs of small animals he had killed.
During the call, the anonymous tipster specifically warned that Cruz might shoot up a school.
The civil complaint goes on to explain that the FBI operator connected the two tips together, but after conferring with her supervisor, the decision was made not to forward the complaints to the Miami field office of the FBI.
The complaint says that in the months after the massacre, the FBI essentially admitted to the public and to Congress that its own internal protocols for dealing with potential mass scooters had not been followed.
But in order for their wrongful death claims to succeed, the parents in both lawsuits will have to successfully argue that the FBI was required under Florida law to control Cruz’s actions, and that the agency was not just exercising its discretion in not responding to the tips about Cruz, say legal experts.
If the history of the Guttenberg and Schentrup’s lawsuit is any indicator, the Pollacks can expect the government to aggressively argue against their efforts to prove that the FBI bears responsibility for the violent death of their daughter.
That lawsuit has been inching forward.
According to federal court filings, a U.S. magistrate judge allowed lawyers for the plaintiffs the ability to view documents that may show exactly which FBI procedures where breached after the tip about Cruz was mishandled.
Those documents, along with many of the filings in the docket, remain under seal, but arguments are expected sometime in April on the government’s motion to dismiss the case from Guttenberg and Schentrup.