When asked to confirm explicitly whether the account belonged to the 19-year-old shooting suspect, the spokeswoman repeated her statement and said: “We don’t comment on handles.”Ĭruz does not appear among Broward County’s registered voters in publicly available Florida records. We have found and immediately deleted the shooter’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram.” There is absolutely no place on our platforms for people who commit such horrendous acts. The account’s username, or handle, appeared to combine the unusual spelling of the gunman’s name with that of a Russian pistol.Īsked why the account had been removed, an Instagram spokeswoman said: “This is a terrible tragedy and our hearts go out to the people who have been affected. The account posted several photographs of weapons in July last year before going dormant.
On social media, an Instagram account under the name nikolascruzmakarov, with a user icon showing a man wearing one of Donald Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” election campaign hats, was taken down by the company after the shooting. As far as I knew, he was like a future school shooter.” Victoria Olvera, also a 17-year-old junior, said of the suspect: “At first, he was really nice.” But later, she said, “he just changed. But of course, he came back.”Ĭruz worked at a discount store near the school, Mutchler said. “When someone’s expelled, you don’t really expect them to come back. “Everyone in the school that knew him speculated about him,” said Mutchler. Mutchler said Cruz posted about killing animals on social media and talked about guns and target practice. The suspect had been captured away from the premises and was seen being driven away in a police cruiser.ĭakota Mutchler, a 17-year-old junior at the school, said he had once been friends with the suspect, but that Cruz started “progressively getting a little more weird, and I kind of cut off from him”. He had an AR-15,” the sheriff said.ġ7 confirmed dead in 'horrific' attack on Florida high school – video report “He had countless magazines, multiple magazines. The sheriff said Cruz was armed with at least one assault rifle. While the FBI has not confirmed the account belonged to the alleged gunman, FBI agents interviewed Bennight again after the shooting.Israel, who identified the shooter as Cruz, said police had found “very disturbing” material when searching his social media.
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Students said some children at the school had been scared of Cruz and that he had boasted about possessing guns and knives.Ī comment left on a YouTube video by a user named Nikolas Cruz warning “I’m going to be a professional school shooter” was also flagged to law enforcement officials last September and subsequently removed by YouTube.īen Bennight, who posted the video and alerted the FBI, told BuzzFeed News that officers followed up “immediately”, asking him if he knew anything about the user who had left the comment and taking a copy of his screenshot. He was expelled from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, last year for disciplinary reasons, according to the Broward County sheriff, Scott Israel.
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