Fellow students 'predicted' Florida school shooting suspect might lash out
Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school students describe suspected gunman Nikolas Cruz as ‘troubled’ and say some people had been scared of him
Former classmates of suspected Florida school gunman Nikolas Cruz, 19, who was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder on Thursday, described him as “weird” and “a loner” and said “everyone predicted” he would do something like the tragedy that unfolded on Wednesday afternoon.
Questions emerged on Thursday over whether law enforcement officials and local authorities had failed to act on warning signs.
He was expelled from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, last year for disciplinary reasons, according to the Broward County sheriff, Scott Israel. Students said some children at the school had been scared of Cruz and that he had boasted about possessing guns and knives.
A comment left on a YouTube video by a user named Nikolas Cruz warning “I’m going to be a professional school shooter” was also flagged to law enforcement officials last September and subsequently removed by YouTube.
Ben Bennight, who posted the video and alerted the FBI, told BuzzFeed News that officers followed up “immediately”, asking him if he knew anything about the user who had left the comment and taking a copy of his screenshot.
While the FBI has not confirmed the account belonged to the alleged gunman, FBI agents interviewed Bennight again after the shooting.
Israel, who identified the shooter as Cruz, said police had found “very disturbing” material when searching his social media.
The sheriff said Cruz was armed with at least one assault rifle. “He had countless magazines, multiple magazines. He had an AR-15,” the sheriff said.
The suspect had been captured away from the premises and was seen being driven away in a police cruiser.
Dakota Mutchler, a 17-year-old junior at the school, said he had once been friends with the suspect, but that Cruz started “progressively getting a little more weird, and I kind of cut off from him”. Mutchler said Cruz posted about killing animals on social media and talked about guns and target practice.
“Everyone in the school that knew him speculated about him,” said Mutchler. “When someone’s expelled, you don’t really expect them to come back. If they’re expelled, they’re gone. But of course, he came back.”
Cruz worked at a discount store near the school, Mutchler said.
Victoria Olvera, also a 17-year-old junior, said of the suspect: “At first, he was really nice.” But later, she said, “he just changed. As far as I knew, he was like a future school shooter.”
On social media, an Instagram account under the name nikolascruzmakarov, with a user icon showing a man wearing one of Donald Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” election campaign hats, was taken down by the company after the shooting.
The account posted several photographs of weapons in July last year before going dormant. The account’s username, or handle, appeared to combine the unusual spelling of the gunman’s name with that of a Russian pistol.
Asked why the account had been removed, an Instagram spokeswoman said: “This is a terrible tragedy and our hearts go out to the people who have been affected. There is absolutely no place on our platforms for people who commit such horrendous acts. We have found and immediately deleted the shooter’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram.”
When asked to confirm explicitly whether the account belonged to the 19-year-old shooting suspect, the spokeswoman repeated her statement and said: “We don’t comment on handles.”
Cruz does not appear among Broward County’s registered voters in publicly available Florida records. His late parents were registered Republicans before their deaths.
Cruz’s mother, Lynda Cruz, died of pneumonia in November last year, neighbors, 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 in New York to Broward County.
The boys were left in the care of a family friend after their mother died, family member Barbara Kumbatovich, of Long Island, said.
Unhappy there, Nikolas Cruz asked to move in with a friend’s family in north-west Broward. The family agreed and Cruz moved in around Thanksgiving. According to the family’s lawyer, Jim Lewis, they knew that Cruz owned the AR-15 but made him keep it locked up in a cabinet. He did have the key, however.
Lewis said the family was devastated and did not see this coming. They are cooperating with authorities, he said.
One 17-year-old told local TV station WSVN: “He’s been a troubled kid and he’s always had a certain amount of issues going on. He shot guns because he felt it gave him, I guess, an exhilarating feeling. He showed me on his phone. I stayed clear of him most of the time, I didn’t want to be with him.”
He added: “It surprises me it’s going on today but it doesn’t surprise me to know it’s him.”
