Confessed Parkland mass-murderer Nikolas Cruz posed such a threat to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that he had to be searched for weapons every morning he was enrolled there, a school security guard said in new testimony.
Cruz, who
killed 17 people in a Valentine’s Day shooting rampage at Stoneman Douglas last year, had previously been subjected to the searches — and barred from wearing a backpack on the Florida campus — because he talked about suicide and wrote “kill” in a notebook, according to the testimony by Kelvin Greenleaf, who was tasked with searching Cruz.
“I think we got concerned when, I think, we found out he drank bleach, tried to hurt himself or something like that, the kid. That’s when we started, like, having the kid come in every morning to be searched by me, but never found a weapon on the kid, never,” Greenleaf said in July 11 testimony,
the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.
Administrators had forced Cruz to withdraw from Stoneman Douglas in February 2017 — a year before he walked onto the campus and massacred 14 students and three educators with an AR-15-style assault rifle.
“I’ve seen kids who didn’t act like Nikolas Cruz shoot up schools. So it’s kind of — I don’t try to, like, label my kids. I know he was different,” Greenleaf testified, according to the report.
“Yeah, we watched him and, you know, we knew we was going to get complaints on him. We knew that. And that’s why we kept such a close eye on him while he was there assigned to our school.”
Greenleaf, who said that he was instructed by the school’s assistant principle to search Cruz every morning for weapons during Cruz’s time at the school, said that Cruz was “trying to frighten kids, jumping from behind…we were watching him.”
“We were watching him. But was there any — was there ever a time where I thought he would like hurt a kid on campus?” Greenleaf said. “No.”
Greenleaf’s deposition was taken as a part of a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the parents of one of the slain students, 18-year-old Meadow Pollack.
The victim’s father, Andrew Pollack, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that he would have never sent his daughter to Stoneman Douglas had he known about Cruz and the dangers he posed.
“They had to frisk him every day. They knew that he was a threat. And they subjected all the kids and my daughter to this. Where were their rights?” Pollack said.
“They didn’t tell us that they’re letting a kid in the school that he’s so violent and dangerous we won’t let him in with his backpack and we have to frisk him. But they let this kid into the school with our children.”
Cruz, 20, faces the death penalty in the Feb. 14, 2018 shooting.
Source: nypost.com, Natalie Musumeci, July 26, 2019
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
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