Florida Shooting: Nikolas Cruz Is Charged With 17 Counts of Murder

A gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The victims included students and adults

The authorities on Thursday charged a 19-year-old man who is suspected of gunning down students and adults at his former high school with 17 counts of premeditated murder.

The suspect, Nikolas Cruz, was booked into jail in Broward County. He had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, a small, bucolic city about an hour north of Miami, which on Wednesday became the site of one of the deadliest shootings in modern United States history, adding to the growing toll of mass killings on school grounds.

“This is catastrophic,” said Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County, who has three children who graduated from the school. “There really are no words.”

• The authorities said the AR-15 rifle that Mr. Cruz used in the attack was purchased legally. “No laws were violated in the procurement of this weapon,” said Peter J. Forcelli, the special agent in charge for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Miami.

• Videos taken from inside the school captured the terror as students crouched for shelter, screaming as the sound of gunfire rang out near them.

• With the Parkland shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern United States history have come in the last five months.

The president calls the gunman ‘mentally disturbed.’

President Trump, in a Twitter post early Thursday, said that the gunman was “mentally disturbed,” and that people should report anyone behaving like Mr. Cruz to the authorities.

“So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior,” Mr. Trump said. “Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!”

‘If I don’t make it, I love you,’ a student tells her mother.

Many students used their phones to keep their parents informed about what was happening, and to document some of the violence that was unfolding around them.

Sarah Crescitelli, a freshman, was in drama class rehearsing for a musical when gunshots rang out.

Hiding in a sweltering storage room with about 40 other students, she typed out a text message to her mother, Stacy, for what she thought might be the last time.

“If I don’t make it,” she wrote, “I love you and I appreciate everything you did for me.”

Another video shows students hiding in a classroom as armed officers enter. The students hold up their hands, some of them visibly trembling.

“Put your phones away!” one officer yells. “Put your phones away!”

A suspect described as a ‘troubled kid.’

The young man who the a uthorities identified as the shooter, Mr. Cruz, previously attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas but was expelled after getting into trouble. He was enrolled at another Broward County school, officials said.

In the hours after the shooting, people who knew Mr. Cruz described him as a “troubled kid” who enjoyed showing off his firearms, bragging about killing animals and whose mother would resort to calling the police to have them come to their home to try to talk some sense into him.

“He always had guns on him,” one student, who did not give his name, told WFOR-TV. “The crazy stuff that he did was not right for school, and he got kicked out of school multiple times for that kind of stuff.”

School officials declined to say why Mr. Cruz no longer attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas. But Amanda Samaroo, whose daughter, Elizabeth, attended the school while he was a student there, said he had been expelled for bringing knives on campus. “Her friends have said he was known to always be mentally ill and would kill animals,” Ms. Samaroo said.

Adding to the grim toll from school shootings

When a gunman killed 20 first graders and six adults with an assault rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, it rattled Newtown, Conn., and reverberated across the world.

Since then, there have been at least 273 school shootings nationwide.

In those incidents, 439 people were shot, 121 of whom were killed.

Source: The New York Times, NYT staff, February 14, 2018

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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Two Executions In Six Hours: Florida Set For Historical Double Execution Tuesday

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