Parkland shooter wanted ‘to kill people’

Text to ex-classmate outlined future plans

Nikolas Cruz had a plan— to shoot people at a park in 2020.

That was what he told a 19-year-old former classmate who met him at an alternative education center at J.P. Taravella High School in Coral Springs in 2017.

“He texted me saying that in the year 2020, hewants to kill people,” she told investigators.

The Broward State Attorney’s Office on Friday released transcripts of numerous witness interviews. Most recount the horror as it unfolded, with teenagers describing the terror of hiding as Cruz made his way through the hallways of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14.

He killed 17 people, wounded 17 more, and traumatized countless others.

Other transcripts shed some light on Cruz’s state of mind before the shooting.

The 19-year-old friend made no mention that Cruz talked of targeting a school, or that she reported his alarming messages to anyone. She said he might have been angry at black people because his girlfriend left him for a black schoolmate.

“He just doesn’t like them at all,” the friend

said. “He wants to kill them all.”

Another former classmate, who survived the shooting without physical injury, said Cruz was known to make anti-Semitic statements aswell.

“He used to always make bad jokes about Jews, Nazis … like [Heil] Hitler, I wish all the Jews were dead and stuff,” he said.

Another student told a detective that he and his classmates fled Marjory Stoneman Douglas High during the shooting. A few minutes later, Cruz came upon him and a group of students walking toward the nearby Wal-Mart.

“And I said like, ‘I thought you got expelled last year,’ ” he said. “And he’s like, ‘No, the school tookme back in.’ ”

Cruz appeared frightened and said he was scared before he slipped away from the crowd.

The boy said he and Cruz were neighbors in Parkland. He said Cruz would bring knives and bullets to school.

“He used to show me but I like try to stay cautious and like no — have nothing to do with him,” the boy said.

The friend from Taravella also talked about Cruz’s fondness for weaponry.

She said she went to his home and he showed her his guns and a “big bag of bullets,” and let her hold one of his guns.

She said he told her he had autism, and that people at school were mean to him. She never heard him say anything anti-Semitic. She didn’t date Cruz, but said hewas interested.

“He always want [sic] a girlfriend,” another student said. “He’d get mad that he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

Cruz used to joke a lot about killing people and killing animals “and saying how he hates the school,” another Stoneman Douglas student said.

Cruz purposefully got into fights with people, she said.

Detectives also interviewed Katherine Blaine, a cousin of Cruz’s late mother, Lynda.

Blaine, wholives in New York, said Nikolas Cruz once knocked his mother’s teeth loose.

She said she never met Nikolas Cruz, but that Lynda told her that “he wanted to go to Wal-Mart or something and she said, ‘No, we’re going home.’ ” He swung his hand and hit her in the mouth.

“He knocked three teeth loose,” Blaine said. “She had to go to the dentist for it.”

She said the incident happened several months before Lynda Cruz died Nov.1, 2017. She had $2,000 in dental bills she was still paying off when she died, Blaine said.

Detectives also interviewed Anthony Borges,15, whowas shot five times.

“I was … like almost dead,” he said. When Cruz passed in front of him again, he said, “I just looked at him. He shot at a back door, and I saw two people dead.” Cruz walked away. Another student described the first shots, saying she thought a balloon had popped. Then a bullet came through the door and hit her computer screen.

Another bullet grazed her arm and ripped a hole in her JROTC shirt.

“That’s when everyone started freaking out and the teacher started screaming, saying to take cover,” she said.

The girl grabbed her phone and called 911.

Three students — Alex Schachter, Alyssa Alhadeff and Alaina Petty — died in her classroom.

A freshman told detectives that his classroom door had been shut, and they didn’t open it for a student who was begging to be let in.

“The first thing that we heard was a kid like a boy like saying, ‘Please, please, help me. Please let me in the classroom,’ ” the student said. “Likehewas crying because like when that happens you’re not allowed to let anybody in. … We didn’t know if Nikolas was there, if he was making him do that. Kids were crying because they felt so bad because they couldn’t help him.”

Staff writers Megan O’Matz and Stephen Hobbs contributed to this report.