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| Nikolas Cruz appearing in court on Feb. 19 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida |
By Del Quentin Wilber Feb. 23, 2018 77 COMMENTS
A person close to the teenager accused of killing 17 people at a Florida high school warned the FBI she was concerned he would “get into a school and just shoot the place up,” according to a transcript of her call with a bureau tip line operator more than a month before the massacre.
The transcript, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, provides chilling detail about the woman’s efforts on Jan. 5 to warn authorities about Nikolas Cruz’s propensity for violence and his troubled past.
“You know, it’s just so much,” she said on the call. “I know he’s—he’s going to explode.” She said she was making the call because she wanted a “clear conscience if he takes off and, and just starts shooting places up.”
The FBI last week acknowledged receiving such a call. But the transcript, and the stark nature of the caller’s precise warnings about Mr. Cruz’s disturbing actions and volatile temperament, previously hasn’t been made public.
The caller began by saying Mr. Cruz had the mental capacity of a 12- or 14-year-old. She said he had started posting messages on his Instagram account that he wanted to kill himself and she’d alerted police to that threat, but wasn’t sure what happened in that investigation.
More recently, Mr. Cruz “switched it to he wants to kill people,” the unidentified woman told the operator in a somewhat rambling conversation.
“Something is gonna happen,” she said. “Because he’s, he doesn’t have the mental capacity. He can’t, he’s so outraged if someone talks to him about certain things.”
The caller described disturbing behavior by Mr. Cruz, including a propensity for cutting up frogs and, at least on one occasion, a bird.
“He brought the bird into the house,” she recounted. “He threw it on his mother’s kitchen counter and he started cutting it up. He has all kinds of hunting knives. I don’t know what knife he used, though. And he started cutting the bird up, and his mother…said, ‘What’re you doing?’ And he says, ‘I want to see what’s inside.’”
Then the caller said, “That to me would be a red flag.”
She said that at some point Mr. Cruz was due to receive $25,000 a year, apparently from a life insurance policy, and she was concerned he would spend it on guns.
Not all of the caller’s details have been confirmed.
The caller also mentioned that Mr. Cruz dressed up as a ninja or an ISIS fighter.
She provided the usernames for several of Mr. Cruz’s social-media accounts and encouraged the FBI to examine them.
“It’s alarming to see these pictures and to know what he’s capable of doing and what could happen,” the caller said. “He’s [been] thrown out of all these schools because he would pick up a chair and just throw it at somebody, a teacher or a student, because he didn’t like the way they were talking to him.”
The FBI last week issued a statement disclosing that the call wasn’t passed on to its Miami field office for investigation.
“Under established protocols, the information provided by the caller should have been assessed as a potential threat to life,” the FBI said. “The information then should have been forwarded to the FBI Miami field office, where appropriate investigative steps would have been taken.”
The FBI and the Justice Department are investigating why the lead wasn’t followed up.
It was one of a stream of mishaps in which law enforcement appears to not have followed up on warnings about Mr. Cruz.
Write to Del Quentin Wilber at del.wilber@wsj.com
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