On Wednesday, a student opened fire at a Florida high school and killed 17 people, including staff members and other students. The suspect accused of perpetrating the crime has confessed to the police. He’s a 19-year-old boy named Nikolas Cruz who claims that he arrived at school on the morning of the incident and then started picking off students, one by one, before ditching the gun and taking off. According to an official court document, Cruz managed to escape the scene by assimilating himself into a crowd of his fleeing classmates. After the shooting, he went to McDonald’s.
Since his confession, Cruz has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. Also, the FBI have admitted to getting a warning call about the shooter last year. They didn’t do anything about it and now, he’s pulled off the deadliest School Shooting in America in six years at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. This should act as a wake-up call and they’ll start taking tip-offs like that more seriously to prevent incidents like this from taking place.
Cruz was ‘armed with an AR-15’
According to documents published by the court of law, Cruz has “stated that he was the gunman” who carried out the shooting, and did so “armed with an AR-15” assault rifle. He shot students both in the corridors and out on the school grounds.
Apparently, he was carrying extra rounds of ammo in a black hold-all that he had slung over his shoulder. And then, following the shooting, he blended into the crowd of students and managed to escape amid the frenzy.
As everyone was going crazy in a flurry to stay safe and get out of the building, Cruz managed to get away completely unnoticed and spend an hour browsing the aisles of Walmart and chowing down on fast food in a McDonald’s restaurant before finally being arrested by police officers.
The shooter had previously been expelled from the school and some other students had made jokes in the past that he would be “the one to shoot up the school.” (That’s right, that’s the climate that America is living in – students are joking about who will be “the one” to commit a school shooting.)
Other students have described Cruz as an “outcast” who was depressed and a bit of a loner and supposedly “crazy about guns.” This is what happens when you create a culture that celebrates and allows guns.
The police investigators have taken a look at the shooter’s social media profiles, which the county sheriff Scott Israel described as “very, very disturbing,” as they make his obsession with guns abundantly clear.
Shooter posed with guns for pictures on Instagram accounts
His two Instagram accounts have now been deleted, but they apparently used to be full of pictures of Cruz posing with a variety of guns and knives. Jordan Jereb, the leader of a white supremacist group called the Republic of Florida, has said that Cruz trained with them, but made it clear that they did not ask him to pull off any school shooting. However, despite the initial quotations and reports of this connection by US media outlets, the police investigators looked into it and couldn’t find any link between Cruz and the white supremacist group.
A YouTube user named Ben Bennight contacted the FBI last year to report a dodgy comment he’d seen that Cruz had made. He spoke to FBI agents for twenty minutes about the guy, and they didn’t do anything to prevent the shooting. After the school shooting in Florida, Bennight again contacted the FBI and they confirmed that they had been keeping an eye on Cruz and carried out some “checks,” but their processes couldn’t work it all out. The school board was also well aware of Cruz’s behavioural problems, emailing teachers to warn them about him.
