Accused Florida school gunman led life of warning signs

PARKLAND, Fla. - The stranger's message on YouTube couldn't have been clearer.

'Im going to be a professional school shooter,” a person identifying himself as Nikolas Cruz wrote in a comment beneath another user's video in September.

The declaration was so disturbing that the video's poster, Ben Bennight, who lives in Alabama, did what Americans are supposed to do. He called the FBI.

But after a brief investigation, officials said, the FBI closed the case, apparently failing to identify the person. It would become a missed opportunity of heartbreaking proportions.

On Wednesday afternoon, a South Florida 19-year-old named Nikolas Cruz took an Uber to the high school from which he had been expelled a year ago. He immediately opened fire with an AR-15 and killed 17 people, officials said.

Cruz initially escaped, officials said, by trying to blend in with fleeing students. He stopped at a Subway and McDonald's and ordered a drink. Not long after, a Coral Springs officer spotted him on a sidewalk. He was wearing the maroon shirt and black pants the gunman was seen wearing. Within moments, he was arrested.

The reality was that Cruz was not somebody who ever blended in. He tormented his neighbors. He posed with guns on Instagram. He was so troublesome at school he got kicked out. When he returned, a school monitor recognized him and radioed a warning - but it was too late.

Now, yet another grieving community and a nation roiled by yet another emotional debate over how to prevent mass shootings must reckon with how a young man who had become a dark joke among fellow students had been intercepted only after an act of mass murder.

'Everyone called him ‘the school shooter,'” said Rachelle Jean, 16, an 11th-grader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, scene of the shooting. 'It was like, he was off.”

Cruz, an adoptee, grew up in the affluent community of Parkland and lived on a peaceful street of upscale homes.

Pale and slight, he caused alarm among neighbors not long after he moved in. A neighbor complained that he bit their young son's ear, said Shelby Speno, a 48-year-old videographer who lives two doors down from the family's former home.

Other neighbors complained that Cruz killed squirrels, poked sticks down rabbit holes and picked fights with kids.

One day, Speno said, she provided a statement to police after her daughter spotted him shooting their neighbors' chickens with a BB gun. Up and down the street, in fact, neighbors said the police were called to the Cruz home dozens of times.

Malcolm Roxburgh, 82, a retired agent for Carnival Cruises, said Cruz would take his dog across the street to attack a neighbors' potbellied pigs.

'He was bad news,” he said. 'We all knew he was bad news.”

When the Cruz family finally moved out, selling their five-bedroom, three-bathroom home in January 2017 for $575,000, many neighbors were relieved.

'Thank heavens!” Roxburgh said. 'We were all so happy.”

After his mother died Nov. 1, Nikolas Cruz and his brother stayed with family friends in Lake Worth, Fla. Unhappy there, he asked a former classmate if he could move in with him. Cruz had been living about 3 miles from the school since Thanksgiving.

Nine months ago, a YouTube user with the handle 'nikolas cruz” posted a comment on a Discovery UK documentary about the gunman in the 1966 University of Texas shooting: 'I am going to do what he did.”

An Instagram account under Cruz's name showed him posing with guns and in masks. In one post, Cruz wrote anti-Muslim slurs.

Investigators said Cruz legally bought the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used in the attack nearly a year ago.

Authorities said Cruz confessed. A judge ordered him held without bail. He was on suicide watch at the jail.

The Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald contributed.