Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Man who left dead animals at Parkland shooting memorial arrested
Broward Sheriff ’s Gregory Tony said his investigators were able to get a potential school shooter off the street by nabbing him for defacing the shrine for Parkland shooting victims near the site of the high school.
Tony said Robert Mondragon, 29, of Margate, has been “popping up on the radar since 2013” and he has a “desire to create an active shooter event in our school system.”
The evidence “startled me,” Tony said, containing an “alarming amount of inquiries on the Internet looking at old active shooter events,” including the shooting at Columbine decades ago, and developing pipe bombs.
Mondragon was arrested about a month ago.
Tony said video shows Mondragon would “literally walk the same path as the previous shooter” in Parkland, leaving dead animals on site. The incident did not take place on school campus, but on the public street.
“He fits every classification that it’s coming,” Tony said. “We’ve been lucky, and luck is not a strategy.”
According to the incident report, on July 20, he “intentionally put a dead duck with its chest cavity cut open on the bench and caused blood spots to be left on the bench even after removal of the duck” at the memorial site in Parkland. The shrine is at the corner of Pine Island and Holmberg roads near Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which was the site of the 2018 school shooting where 17 children and staff were murdered.
The next day, a dead raccoon was located on top of the same bench at the Memorial Garden. On July 31, there was a dead opossum.
A Sheriff’s deputy pulled Mondragon over and “the deputy observed what appeared to be bird feathers and blood strewn about the front passenger side floorboard. The defendant told deputies that he had a dead bird in his car because he likes the smell and likes the metal and blood smell that emit from the dead animal.”
Mondragon was arrested on Aug. 6 and is being kept away from other inmates because of his “pervasive and continuing mental health issues,” according to court records.
He is being held without bond on three charges of removing or disfiguring a tomb or monument, violation of probation for battery and indecent exposure, and violation of a risk protection order. In the battery and indecent exposure case, court records show in September 2021 he was arrested in Davie after asking a woman for directions to get her attention, and then exposing himself. He then got into a “physical altercation” with an officer during questioning, and bit the officer’s left middle finger, breaking the skin and causing it to bleed.
Authorities said in 2018 he was served a Risk Protection Order — the red flag law passed by the state after Nikolas Cruz’s deadly rampage through Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — by the Coral Springs Police Department, which restricts him from being able to purchase firearms. The Risk Protection Order was for a series of nine different events, including self-mutilation that involved sewing his mouth shut with a needle and thread in 2014. The events also included him acting “erratically” at a church in March 2018 and posting about “pulling a Columbine” on social media and “causing a massacre” at the Aventura Mall, both in 2013, according to Coral Springs Police.
In July, he posted a picture on his Facebook account “unlawfully and intentionally” holding a Yugoslavian SKS rifle, according to the arrest affidavit. And on Aug. 4, officials said Mondragon had an Instagram account under the alias Mors Mortem (Latin for “Death is Death”) and it showed him holding a firearm.
Tony called a news conference Friday morning to draw attention to the agency’s efforts to “mitigate school threats” and his Threat Management Unit, which has arrested more than 200 people since its inception.
Threat unit detectives say Mondragon was obsessed with school shooters, both real and fictional. They said Mondragon’s facial tattoos resemble those of Tate Langdon, the character from the television series American Horror Story based on the Columbine High School massacre.
They said they also found text messages about school shootings and internet searches about school shooters, how to break into steel doors, shootings involving multiple victims, and pipe bombs, as well as slang terms for killing cops. Two weeks before the end of the last school year, Mondragon walked the path the Parkland school shooter from the high school to Walmart on Feb. 14, 2018, officials said.
Mondragon is the “most severe individual we’ve been able to apprehend and take off the streets,” Tony said.
Mondragon’s defense attorney, Andrew Coffey, said his client had a “troubled and traumatic childhood” and is currently a victim in a pending case, but no details were available. “We know that he needs help and we’re doing everything we can to get him that help,” Coffey said.