-“I know he’s going to explode,” a woman who knew Mr. Cruz said on the F.B.I.’s tip line on Jan. 5. Her big worry was that he might resort to slipping “into a school and just shooting the place up.”
-Three months before the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, a family friend dialed 911 to tell the Broward County sheriff’s office about Mr. Cruz’s personal arsenal. “I need someone here because I’m afraid he comes back and he has a lot of weapons,” the friend said.
-In Ms. Deschamps’s 911 call, she told the dispatcher that Mr. Cruz already had about eight guns that he kept at a friend’s house and that he had just been thrown out of the house after the tantrum in which he punched the walls, hurled things around her home
-She added: “It’s not the first time he put a gun on somebody’s head.” Ms. Deschamps made it clear that her new houseguest was obsessed with firearms and had threatened both his mother and his brother. “That’s all he wants is his gun,” she said. “And that’s all he cares about is his gun. He bought tons of bullets and stuff
-On Nov. 30, two and a half months before the Parkland massacre, an unidentified caller from Massachusetts told the Broward County sheriff’s office that Mr. Cruz was collecting guns and knives and that “he could be a school shooter in the making.”
-Two years before, the office reported receiving “thirdhand information” from the son of one of Mr. Cruz’s neighbors that he “planned to shoot up the school on Instagram.”
-The tip that the F.B.I. received in early January from someone close to Mr. Cruz suggested that he owned a gun and had talked about carrying out a school shooting. But
the bureau failed to investigate, even though the tipster said Mr. Cruz had a “desire to kill people, erratic behavior and disturbing social media posts.”
-The F.B.I. also received a tip from a bail bondsman in Mississippi in September about a suspicious comment left on his YouTube channel by a “nikolas cruz” who professed a desire to be a “professional school shooter.” The bondsman notified YouTube, which promptly took down the comment.
-Over the course of the January call, which lasted more than 13 minutes, the tipster warned the F.B.I. that Mr. Cruz had been adrift since his mother’s death in November. The tipster provided four Instagram accounts for Mr. Cruz, which she said showed photos of sliced up animals and the firearms he had amassed. The caller, whose name was redacted on the transcript, said Mr. Cruz had used money from a life insurance policy after his mother’s death to purchase the weapons.
“If you go onto his Instagram pages, you’ll see all the guns,” the woman said.
-Before she died in early November, Mr. Cruz’s mother, Lynda Cruz, had called the authorities numerous times over the past decade to report her son. She said he had hit her with the plastic hose from a vacuum, and once threw her against the wall after she took his Xbox away, adding that he suffered from anger issues as well as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
-Since Columbine in 1999, it has been standard protocol for authorities on site not to wait for backup or reinforcements but to engage the gunman immediately and disrupt the spray of gunfire. And yet....
-When Coral Springs police officers arrived at
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High Schoolin Parkland, FL, on Valentine’s Day, they saw not just the officer assigned to the school but three more Broward police officers with pistols drawn but taking cover behind their cars as a gunman was inside killing 17 students and staff,
CNN’s Jake Tapper reported Friday, citing sources.
When those Coral Springs police entered the building, the four original Broward officers on scene did not join them, sources told CNN.
It is far easier to believe this was allowed to happen than convince oneself that it was just an unexpected tragedy.
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