More than 30 people knew that Nikolas Cruz was displaying disturbing behaviors, like threatening to kill his mother and torturing small animals, long before he committed the February massacre at his high school in Parkland, Florida.
For years before the shooting, Cruz allegedly killed a duck with a tire iron, shot squirrels with a pellet gun, killed frogs, decapitated a bird and showed a fellow student a picture of a decapitated cat, according to the county sheriff. Cruz reportedly made racist anti-gay and and anti-Semitic jokes, used the term “white power” and drew swastikas on his belongings. Classmates also said Cruz brought bullets into school, bragged about owning guns and would search for firearms on school computers.
“It’s very troubling behavior, and in many cases it probably should have caused them to report what they heard, saw or learned,” Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri told the Sun Sentinel. “But for a variety of reasons they did not.”
Yet two students claim they did report Cruz’s frightening actions prior to the shooting when he allegedly killed 17 people, and said they were “brushed off” by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s administration.
Gualtieri said that the student’s recollections of their meetings with school officials seem to “corroborate each other,” but that Stoneman Douglas’ principal and vice principal are both denying these conversations.
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