“I know he’s going
to explode,” a woman who knew Cruz, pictured above, 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.” Forty days later, Cruz is accused of doing just
that, barging into his former high school in Parkland, Fla., and shooting 17
people to death.
Three months
before the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, a family
friend dialed 911 to tell the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office about 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.
Cruz, 19, himself called the authorities just after
Thanksgiving, describing how he had been in a
fight and was struggling with the death of his mother. “The thing is I lost my
mother a couple of weeks ago, so like I am dealing with a bunch of things right
now,” he said in a childlike voice, sounding agitated and out of breath.
The authorities have acknowledged mishandling numerous
warning signs that Cruz was deeply troubled. There were tips to the F.B.I.
about disturbing social media posts. There were visits by social services to
his home. There were dozens of calls to 911 and the local authorities, some
mentioning fears that he was capable of violence.
Reviewing the
transcripts of those calls, and listening to the audiotapes of some of them, is
a chilling exercise that makes Cruz’s arrest in one of America’s deadliest
school shootings seem less than a complete surprise. (Read the transcripts here.)
In a 911 call on Nov. 29, Rocxanne
Deschamps, the family friend who took in Cruz after the death of his
mother, expressed fear that he was going to get a gun after fighting with her
son. Ms. Deschamps lives in a faded, off-white mobile
home, where Cruz and his younger brother, Zachary, stayed with her briefly.
In Ms. Deschamps’s 911 call, she told the dispatcher that 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 and got into a fight with Rock, her
22-year-old son.
“He got pissed off
and then he came in the house and started banging all the doors and banging in
the walls and hitting the walls and throwing everything in the room,” she said.
“And then my son got in there and he said, ‘Stop it,’ and he didn’t want to
stop.”
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
and I took it away from him.”
Ms. Deschamps
declined to comment on Friday, and her lawyer did not respond to phone messages
and emails over the past week.
More than once, Cruz was identified by those around him as someone capable of carrying out
a school shooting.
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 Cruz was collecting guns and knives and that “he
could be a school shooter in the making.”
Two years before, the office reported receiving “third hand
information” from the son of one of 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 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 Cruz had a “desire to kill people, erratic behavior
and disturbing social media posts.”
That information
should have been sent to the Miami F.B.I. field office, the bureau said.
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.
The F.B.I. said it
did not have enough information to determine if “nikolas cruz” was a real name
or a pseudonym, and the bureau said it could not justify keeping a file on the
tip open and closed it in October.
When the second
tip reached the F.B.I. in West Virginia in January, a specialist was able to
view the earlier tip, too. But even then, the specialist, in consultation with her
supervisor, decided that there was not enough evidence to pursue it and that it
did not appear to be an imminent threat.
The acting F.B.I.
deputy director, David L. Bowdich, briefed congressional staff members about
the case on Friday and acknowledged the bureau’s failure to investigate,
according to three people with direct knowledge of the meeting.
Over the course of the January call, which lasted more
than 13 minutes, the tipster warned the F.B.I. that Cruz had been adrift
since his mother’s death in November. She said that Cruz had “the mental
capacity of a 12 to a 14 year old.” The tipster provided four Instagram
accounts for 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 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 calling the
F.B.I., the woman telephoned Broward sheriff’s deputies in Parkland, worried
that Cruz might kill himself. But she did not hear back from them and became increasingly alarmed
after she said Cruz posted online that “he wants to kill people.”
Two deputies have
been placed on restricted duty while the Broward office investigates how two
calls about Cruz, the one in November and an earlier one in 2016, may
have been mishandled.
Before she died in early November, 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.
Cruz progressed to more distressing
behavior, including possibly shooting a neighbor’s chicken with a BB gun,
collecting hate symbols, cutting himself, and possibly swallowing gasoline in a
failed suicide attempt, according to complaints to the local authorities. Below Cruz apprehended and hand cuffed after the shooting.
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