Alleged shooter charged
Teen faces 17 counts of premeditated murder after attack at Florida high school
PARKLAND, Fla. — An orphaned 19-year-old with a troubled past and his own AR-15 rifle was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder Thursday morning following the deadliest school shooting in the U.S. in five years.
Law enforcement officials said Nikolas Cruz legally purchased the assault weapon used in the attack.
Students thought it was just another drill at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a fire alarm sounded, requiring them to file out of their classrooms Wednesday afternoon. That’s when police say Cruz, equipped with a gas mask, smoke grenades and magazines of ammunition, opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon, killing 17 people and sending hundreds of students fleeing into the streets.
As reactions poured in Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump focused on the young man’s mental health, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he wants the Justice Department to study how mental illness and gun violence intersect, to better understand how law enforcement can use existing laws to intervene before school shootings begin.
“It cannot be denied that something dangerous and unhealthy is happening in our country,” Sessions told a group of sheriffs in Washington. In “every one of these cases, we’ve had advance indications and perhaps we haven’t been effective enough in intervening.”
Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott said he has already told House Speaker Richard Corcoran that “if someone is mentally ill, he should not have access to a gun.” Broward County Schools Superintendent Rob Runcie said “now is the time to have a real conversation about gun control legislation,” and if adults can’t manage that in their lifetimes, he said students will do it.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel called for giving law enforcement more power to detain people who make threats.
“What I’m asking our lawmakers to do is go back to places like Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., to give police the power,” the sheriff said, to detain people who make graphic threats or post disturbing material online, and bring them involuntarily to mental health professionals to be examined.
In a national address from the White House, Trump said he wants America’s children to know, “you are never alone, and you never will be.”
He said no child should have to go to school fearing for their lives. He said he’ll travel to Florida meet with victims’ families, explore how to better secure schools, and “tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”
At no point did Trump mention guns or how to control them.
Thirteen wounded survivors were hospitalized, including two people in critical condition. The sheriff said some bodies remained inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Thursday as authorities investigate the crime scene. The slain included a school athletic director and another adult who worked as a monitor at the school. Runcie called them heroes.
Cruz was ordered held without bond and booked into jail, still wearing a hospital gown after he was treated for laboured breathing.
It was the nation’s deadliest school shooting since a gunman attacked an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., more than five years ago.
Cruz legally purchased the AR-15 used in the attack about a year ago, law enforcement officials said. The officials, not authorized to discuss this publicly, spoke on condition of anonymity.
FBI agent Rob Lasky said the agency investigated a 2017 YouTube comment posted with the screen name Nikolas Cruz that said “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” Lasky said the FBI did a database review, but couldn’t determine the time or location of the post, or the true identity of the person making the comment.
Authorities offered no immediate details about a possible motive, except to say that Cruz had been kicked out of the high school, which has about 3,000 students. Students who knew him described a volatile teenager whose strange behaviour had caused others to end friendships with him.
Cruz’s mother Lynda Cruz died of pneumonia on Nov. 1 neighbours, friends and family members said, according to the Sun Sentinel. Cruz and her husband, who died of a heart attack several years ago, adopted Nikolas and his biological brother, Zachary, after the couple moved from Long Island, N.Y., to Broward County.
The boys were left in the care of a family friend after their mother died, said family member Barbara Kumbatovich, of Long Island.
Unhappy there, Nikolas Cruz asked to move in with a friend’s family in northwest Broward. That family agreed and Cruz moved in. According to the family’s lawyer, who did not identify them, they knew that Cruz owned the AR-15 but made him keep it locked up in a cabinet.