Stoneman Douglas student warned school that Cruz could become the shooter

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"While Nikolas Cruz was still a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, administrators were warned that he was looking at guns on a school computer and told a schoolmate that he liked “to see people in pain.”

A school official told the student who complained to mind his own business, the student’s father told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Friday.

Cruz had told the student’s brother “he wanted to shoot up the school,” a witness statement released by the State Attorney’s Office on Friday says. The student’s girlfriend gave a sworn statement the night of the Feb. 14 shooting. In an interview Friday, the boys’ father helped fill in the details.

The episode is yet another alert made to administrators at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that Cruz might be dangerous. For years, the school district had known he was obsessed with guns and violence. In early 2016, a neighbor alerted the Broward Sheriff’s Office that Cruz threatened on Instagram to shoot up a school. Cruz also used the school computer to research how to make a nail bomb. And school officials were alerted in fall of 2016 that he threatened to kill a classmate.

Cruz confessed to killing 17 people and injuring 17 others in the Parkland high school shooting he used to attend. He is awaiting trial.

After watching a video about school shootings, Hunter Dubois, a freshman at the time, thought Cruz fit the profile. He took his concerns to Assistant Principal Jeff Morford, his father, Anthony Dubois, told the Sun Sentinel. He had seen Cruz looking at guns on the computer, and heard him make “crazy statements,” Dubois said.

When they met for the first time, he told Hunter, “Hi, I’m Nik, and I like to see people in pain.” He would aim his fingers at birds in the sky pretending he was shooting them, his father said.

The senior Dubois said his son was told by Morford that he “should look into autism.”

Cruz was thought to have autism. He also was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

“He was informed that he shouldn’t be getting into other people’s business and not to worry about him, he’s being dealt with,” Dubois told the Sun Sentinel.

Broward schools spokeswoman Tracy Clark said she couldn’t answer questions about the threat and what school officials did to respond to it, including whether they instituted any security precautions specifically related to Cruz’s threats.

“Our office is unable to provide any information on your inquiry, as this falls under the rules protecting student information and records,” she responded in an email Friday.

Cruz was forced to withdraw from the school shortly after the incident.

Dubois said his son was upset that his complaint didn’t prevent the shooting.

“He’s like, ‘How did this happen? I reported him and he still did this.’ And I tried to explain to him, ‘You did your job right. You did 100 percent what you were supposed to do. It was the school and law enforcement that failed.”

Hunter’s older brother, Anthony Dubois, was in Junior ROTC class with Cruz. Anthony’s girlfriend, Ashley Korbelak, came forward to BSO deputies the evening of the shooting, after recognizing Cruz in photographs. She said Cruz made threats in fall 2016 about a school shooting to his classmate Dubois.

“He said to Anthony, ‘Don’t come to school tomorrow because this is going to happen,’ ” Korbelak told BSO Det. Brian Tutler. “He took that threat very seriously and reported him to school administration.”

The boys’ father said he didn’t recall that specific threat, but said it was his younger son who complained to the school.

Korbelak said she and her boyfriend saw Cruz at a Walmart that same school year. She said he appeared disheveled and “he was hiding behind … the rows of merchandise. And he would keep looking from side to side.”

She said he had leaves in his hair, and “a few branches.” She overhead him telling her boyfriend Anthony Dubois that he was “looking for a gun.” He “did kind of a back alley deal with this guy. Where he would give him the money immediately then would promise to leave the gun in um … the bushes,” she told the detective.

Even after he was transferred to an alternative school, Cruz could have been prevented from doing harm, Anthony Dubois, the father, said, “if he was reached by the right people, to help him the proper way.”

In other statements to detectives:

Anthony Katsikis, a worker at Walmart near the school, told investigators that as news unfolded of the calamity he approached two male teens sitting on a bench inside the store. They were obviously from Stoneman Douglas. He asked them what happened.

Later, he realized he had been speaking to Cruz himself, who told him there’d been a shooting.

Many other students in the store were crying, but Cruz was calm.

“I just remember that he just wasn’t fazed by it,” Katsikis told a detective. “He was kinda like nonchalant.”

An 11th grader from room 1214 hid behind a small file cabinet in a corner diagonal from the window of the door Cruz shot through.

He said Cruz wore a black hat, black sunglasses, and a bulletproof vest.

A 9th grade boy, interviewed in the pediatric emergency room at Broward Health in Fort Lauderdale, told a detective he was in study hall when the fire alarm rang and he and other students went out into the hall. But the exit doors were locked.

Soon, people started screaming and they ran to try to get back into the classroom, but it was too late.

Cruz pointed a weapon at him.

The boy dove for cover in an alcove outside a locked bathroom and was hit in the leg by a ricocheting bullet.

“I thought I was going to die,” he told a detective. “I was truly, truly scared.”

He said Cruz wore a ”grayish shirt” and a hoodie and he looked “like death” because “you couldn’t see his face, it was like empty.”

“It was like empty, just darkness,” he said, as the detective struggled to understand.

He grappled for the right terminology, saying if you looked up a picture of death on the Internet, it would look like Cruz that day — hooded, with darkness inside.

“So kind of like the Grim Reaper?” the detective asked.

“The Grim Reaper, exactly.”"


Add this onto the list of red flags for Cruz.

School Massacre Archives wrote:

A school official told the student who complained to mind his own business, the student’s father told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Friday.

Ok, I think we should ask the question. Were the administrators in on it? 

I kid of course but this is some really damning stuff.

Also:

Quote :

"Don’t come to school tomorrow"

Is it wrong that I laughed at this?

QuestionMark wrote:

School Massacre Archives wrote:

Quote :

"Don’t come to school tomorrow"

Is it wrong that I laughed at this?

Some say Cruz allegedly posted on R9K forum before the shooting, so obviously he's a space robot too

So he told someone after the shooting that there had been a shooting? At the Walmart where he bought the soda from a subway I guess. Huh. That’s interesting.