Nikolas Cruz was ready to kill
The United States has another massacre on its long list of violent shootings. The attack on Parkland High School in South Florida is the second bloodiest of those that occurred in schools in that country. The shooter caused 17 deaths and more than 20 injured and then was arrested. But there have been others ... A 64-year-old man shot in the back of his bedroom window at a hotel against a crowd that had gone to a country music concert in Las Vegas in October 2017. The attack left 58 dead and 546 wounded. The attacker committed suicide. A heavily armed young man opened fire inside a gay bowling alley in Orlando on June 12, 2016 and killed 49 people.
The attacker died in a subsequent shooting. The attack had to do with his sympathy to the radical Islamic State group. A 23-year-old student of Korean origin shot inside Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg in April 2007: 27 students and five teachers were killed. The shooter committed suicide.
The police photograph of Nikolas Cruz, after consummating his irrational slaughter and being captured, becomes an object of contemplation.
Who was? Another face that will forget about a social illness. A 19-year-old boy, member of a supremacist organization, expelled from Parkland High School, Florida, where he returned to empty his former partners a torrent of anger forged in who knows what personal cauldron of ghosts and delusions. A continuator of the American saga of individuals who exploit and kill. Another face to look for the roots of evil.
At the institute, Cruz, a depressive without treatment, was reputed to be a grenade ready to burst. Both feared that he came to ban the entry with a backpack and in 2017 he was expelled for indiscipline and threats to other students.
His companions remember him carrying weapons, without hesitation in showing them, and that once, in a violent outburst, he kicked out a school window. Apart from others, quiet and respectful in the classroom, with problems with some girls, this is what a teacher says. The truth is that Nikolas was responsible for cultivating a profile of worshiper of weapons. In his social networks he published very, very disturbing contents. They were phrases like: "I want to kill people with my AR-15", the assault rifle that he used in school.
Authentic threats that led a YouTube user to alert the FBI in September, which conducted inquiries without conclusive results. Cruz, an orphan and whose adoptive parents have died, had also hung portraits of his with pistols and his face covered and holding knives, or a bed unmade on which several long weapons and a bulletproof vest were lying.
The AR-15 had acquired it legally thanks to the permissiveness of Florida with weapons. And even more: he had embarked on a military training program for young people, reaping optimum grades. No one stopped Nikolas Cruz, but he had painstakingly completed the self-portrait of an individual ready to kill.
On Wednesday he gave his canvas the last brush, real blood. Armed with his rifle for police and military use and taking advantage of his knowledge as a former student of the school's fire alarm protocols, he blew up the siren to cause chaos, threw smoke cans to increase confusion and with his mouth and His nose was covered with a mask, he advanced through the haze, firing with his assault rifle while students and professors looked for a classroom where to close themselves to save his life.
El País newspaper spoke the night of the killing with Daniel Journey one of the surviving students who met him. Journey said the same as other colleagues to the media. That he was a marginal without friends, that he had the habit of activating the school fire alarm. His companions looked at him with suspicion and thought that if someday in his school an armed shooter would burst with a blind desire to annihilate, that would be Nikolas Cruz.
