Cell phone videos of confessed Parkland, Fla. school shooter Nikolas Cruz show the shooter saying he had a goal to kill “at least 20 people with an AR-15” and named his target. The newly-released videos were recorded before the shooting occurred.
Cruz traveled to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. on Valentine’s Day with guns and murderous intent, the videos strongly suggest. Many argued in the aftermath of the shooting deaths of 17 people there that warning signs were missed.
In the video, Cruz says, “I’m going to be the next school shooter of 2018. My goal is at least 20 people with an AR-15 . . . when you see me on the news, you’ll all know who I am.”
The Sun-Sentinel was the first to publish the videos. Two other videos, besides the one above, also exist. The father of Jaime Guttenberg, one of the students Cruz murdered, read what Cruz said and himself commented that he could not understand the depths of Cruz’s “evil.”
“I already know what he did. He’s evil. Repulsive. He deserves to be dead. He talked about how he was going to ‘be someone’ now. It’s a level of thought that I can’t comprehend,” Fred Guttenberg told the Sun-Sentinel. “It looks, from the words, like the kid had joy. I don’t want to see the delight he took in planning the murders of our children.”
Critics passed blame after the shootings to the family with whom Cruz was living, local law enforcement, or the FBI for missing red flags. Florida couple James and Kimberly Snead, who took in Cruz after his mother died, appeared on “Good Morning America” after the shooting. They said he was “polite” and “seemed normal.” The FBI then released a statement admitting that “protocols were not followed” when a tip about Cruz’s “desire to kill” was reported to its Public Access Line (PAL) on Jan. 5, 2018.
Cruz is thought to have opened a YouTube account where he wrote that he was “going to be a professional school shooter.” Those words echo what Cruz said in the newly-released video.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office was also criticized, especially for Deputy Scot Peterson‘s response to the shooting.
[Image via CBS 12 screengrab]
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