The story behind the shooting at Florida Institute
Nikolas Cruz had been expelled from the center, had just been orphaned and was feared by his classmates. The young man also showed that he had prepared the attack thoroughly. He entered shooting from the street, his face covered with a mask. During his progress through the corridors, he was throwing smoke bombs and activating fire alarms, according to media.
Nikolas Cruz, 19, had already scared his classmates at Stoneman Douglas, Parkland (Florida). Before being expelled due to lack of discipline in this high school, some students had already suffered his threats and even commented that, if there was ever a mass shooting in the facility, the shooter would undoubtedly be Nikolas Cruz. He had launched "very disturbing" messages recently on his social networks, some in Arabic. Cruz, born in September 1998, had aroused fears at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School - where he has killed 17 people - for his threats to other students. In fact, he had been forbidden to enter the center with a backpack.
According to some media, he was calm and respectful in class, but an outcast in the social life of the school, a withdrawn boy who showed off having arms. He even used to carry some, which he had no fears in exhibiting. On his Instagram account, now deleted, he had posted images in which he was displaying pistols. In fact, not only he had weapons of war - he perpetrated the massacre with a Colt AR-15 rifle, of police and military use - but he had received training to use them. Pentagon sources quoted by the agency France Presse have assured that it had undertaken a junior military training program. Besides, he was a hunter. Cruz had bought the gun legally and in the house in which he resided he was obliged to keep it locked in a closet.
How more sad stories like this are we to face? Cruz’ taste for weapons and for speaking about their use had made some students in the center afraid that he would perpetrate a massacre that he finally carried on. "The truth is that a lot of people said that if someone could do it, that would be Cruz," one student explained to the local WJXT channel. His erratic and undisciplined behavior had caught the attention of the teachers and the students. "Last year he had threatened some students and asked him to leave the center," Jim Gard, a math teacher who taught Cruz during a semester in 2016, told the Miami Herald. "He also had problems with some girls", the teacher added.
The students remembered him as a problematic kid, with some violent outbursts, like the one that led him to kick a window in high school. Recently, Cruz had posted "very disturbing" messages on social media, according to Broward County Sheriff, Scott Israel, who did not detail the content of these posts. A year ago he was expelled from Stoneman Douglas. The expulsion almost coincided with the death of his mother last November, which left Nikolas and his brother Zachary in the orphanage, since the father had died several years earlier. Too much to bear for a young boy. But, could any of this be avoided? I believe it could. I’m sure the people who lost their loved ones at the scene think the same, although nothing could bring them back now.
