The Parkland shooting could have been avoided had the FBI taken into account disturbing information about Nikolas Cruz, the shooter. It is in any case the conclusion of the American justice which should compensate the victims and families of victims of the shooting of Parkland to the tune of 130 million dollars, reported on Monday the New York Times.
On Valentine’s Day in 2018, Nikolas Cruz opened fire at his former high school in Parkland, Florida with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, killing 17 people and injuring about 15 others, in what was one of the worst school massacres in the United States. 19 years old at the time, he had been able to legally buy his weapon despite his psychiatric history.
Two reports ignored by the FBI
The US federal police admitted after the shooting had not investigated two pieces of information they had received concerning him. The owner of a YouTube channel had reported five months before the facts a comment left under one of his videos in which an Internet user by the name of “nikolas cruz” had claimed that he would become “a professional school shooter”.
Then in January 2018, six weeks before the killing, a woman called the FBI number to provide information and detailed how the young man showed on Instagram the weapons and ammunition he was accumulating. “I know it will explode”, she had warned, saying her fear that the young man “slips into a school and starts shooting”, according to the New York Times.
The admission of this error by the FBI had devastated the families of victims, who had finally sued the federal police for negligence, recalls the American daily. Nikolas Cruz, 23 today, pleaded guilty last month to 17 counts of murder and said he was “sorry”. He must now be brought before a jury for his sentence to be fixed. Prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty.