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Title: Hmm: FBI warned about Parkland school shooter...but couldn’t ID him?
Source:
HotAir
URL Source: https://hotair.com/archives/2018/02 ... arned-parkland-school-shooter/
Published: Feb 15, 2018
Author: Ed Morrissey
Post Date: 2018-02-15 14:45:48 by Tooconservative
Keywords: None
Views: 3047
Comments: 16
After a mass casualty incident, one question gets asked: Did anyone see warning signs about the perpetrator? In the case of the Parkland, Florida massacre, the warning signs have already begun to emerge, including one strong enough to get the FBI involved. Buzzfeed reports this morning that a YouTube producer notified the FBI months ago about a comment on one of his videos that claimed, “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” The commenter’s name? Nikolas Cruz: Agents with the bureau’s Mississippi field office got back to him “immediately,” Bennight said, and conducted an in-person interview the following day, on Sept. 25. “They came to my office the next morning and asked me if I knew anything about the person,” Bennight told BuzzFeed News. “I didn’t. They took a copy of the screenshot and that was the last I heard from them.” Not long after Cruz’ arrest, the FBI contacted Bennight again, but he had little other information than what he had told them the first time. Was this a coincidence, or a message from the same Nikolas Cruz? It’d have to be one hell of a coincidence, given the non-traditional spelling of the first name. So what did the FBI do with that information in the fall? For that matter, the same question could be asked about local officials. School teachers and administrators knew that Cruz had threatened students, the Miami Herald reported late yesterday, and had barred him from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School campus. The students certainly knew Cruz was a potential danger: “All he would talk about is guns, knives and hunting,” said Joshua Charo, 16, a former classmate at the high school. “I can’t say I was shocked. From past experiences, he seemed like the kind of kid who would do something like this.” … Charo, his former classmate, said Cruz had earlier been suspended from Stoneman Douglas High for fighting — and also because he was found with bullets in his backpack. Sheriff Israel said at a news conference that Cruz had been expelled for “disciplinary reasons” but he did not provide any details of what led to that action. Math teacher Jim Gard remembered that the school administration earlier sent out an email warning teachers about Cruz. “We were told last year that he wasn’t allowed on campus with a backpack on him,” said Gard, who had him in class. “There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus.” Curiously, though, the warnings never got to the school district’s superintendent: That seems very strange. If the school considered Cruz enough of a threat to send warnings out to teachers, why wouldn’t they notify the school district? After all, Cruz’ expulsion meant that he had to attend a different school in the same district, which would have presented a threat to that facility. That is less explicable than the FBI’s lack of action. The FBI will face a lot of questions about their earlier involvement in the Cruz threat (assuming the Buzzfeed story is accurate), but they are a federal law enforcement agency, not a social welfare organization. Their jurisdiction is federal law rather than local, and if Cruz didn’t violate federal law, they had no direct action to take. Posting stupid comments on YouTube videos is not a federal crime, and a threat has to be specific in order for it to cross over from stupid comment to actionable criminal violation. The FBI could have notified local law enforcement if they saw a potential threat, though. Did they? Did the school notify local law enforcement of the threat posed by Cruz, or even of finding bullets in his backpack while at school? If they didn’t notify the superintendent, it would likely mean they didn’t get law enforcement involved, either. It seems there were at least a few opportunities to put some obstacles in Cruz’ way before he walked onto the Douglas High campus yesterday. Update: The FBI agent in charge of the shooting probe said today that they could not identify the commenter in the original investigation: — Reuters Top News (@Reuters) February 15, 2018 If an actual crime had been committed, they may have been able to gain access to IP records and other data through search warrants and subpoenas. Without evidence of a crime, they likely would have had very limited ability to figure out who “Nikolas Cruz” was, and where he was, unless they’d gotten tipped about him earlier. And that, sadly, does not seem to be the case. Poster Comment: They are only now starting to look closely at all the warnings there were about this little psycho and how the school and the FBI failed to stop him, once identified as a serious threat to public safety. And what the hell is up with the FBI? They botched that Vegas mass murderer investigation royally and now they miss this? 
The YouTuber, 36-year-old Ben Bennight, alerted the FBI, emailing a screenshot of the comment to the bureau’s tips account. He also flagged the comment to YouTube, which removed it from the video. The portrait of Nikolas Cruz, suspected of fatally shooting 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland and wounding 15 others at his former school, is a troubled teen with few friends and an obsessive interest in weapons. Administrators considered him enough of a potential threat that one teacher said a warning was emailed last year against allowing him on the campus with a backpack. Superintendent Robert Runcie told reporters on Wednesday afternoon that he did not know of any concerns raised about the student. “We received no warnings,” Runcie said. “Potentially there could have been signs out there. But we didn’t have any warning or phone calls or threats that were made.” JUST IN: FBI investigated school shooting threat made on YouTube last year but could not identify person behind it – FBI agent in charge of Florida shooting probe https://t.co/YmW4VvoVt4
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#3. To: Tooconservative (#0)
The AR15 rifle was designed by Eugene Stoner and available to the public in 1963. The AK47 was available to buy by the American populace even prior to that. Why is it that we didn't have school Shootings in the 60's, 70's or 80's if it's a gun issue? All you anti gun AGENDA folk can eat my shat.
#4. To: GrandIsland, Justified (#3)
(Edited)
I think I own too many guns to be called anti-gun. So no thanks to your offer of a snack. It is not as though there were not a few examples of massacre back in the day. They simply were not as widely published. We tend to forget these things, like to romanticize the Good Old Days. They weren't always so good. Let's look at just two incidents. There are others. Chronicle: Survivor recalls 1959 Houston school blast that killed 6 And far worse, the worst school massacre in American history (killed 38 children and 6 adults, wounding another 58): Wiki: Bath School disaster, 1927 So, did you know either of those? Cold-blooded mass murder of children in schools. On the Right, there is a little familiarity with the Bath incident, hardly anyone recalls the Houston bombing. Nothing new under the sun. Nice to see you posting, Justified.
Why not back in 1907, when Winchester brought out the .351 self loading semi auto, with an optional 20 round magazine? High capacity, semi-auto rifles have been around for a long time without being used in mass civilian shootings. The only thing that will stop this madness is a national right to carry law, with a requirement that all teachers train & carry in schools.
You're full of crap! It's an ahole issue, pinhead. On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, a former Marine sharpshooter, took rifles and other weapons to the observation deck atop the Main Building tower at the University of Texas at Austin, then opened fire on persons indiscriminately on the surrounding campus and streets. Over the next 90 minutes he shot and killed thirteen people (including one unborn child) and injured thirty-one others; an additional victim died in the hospital, while a final victim died in 2001 from the lingering effects of his wounds. The incident ended when police reached Whitman and shot him dead. As of November 2017, the attack is ranked as the eighth-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Whitman had killed his mother and wife in their home the night before. It has been suggested that his violent impulses, with which he had been struggling for years, were due to a tumor found in his brain on autopsy. Charles Whitman, 25,[1] was studying architectural engineering.[2] Whitman was intelligent; at the age of six, he scored 139 on an IQ test.[L]:6 At twelve years old he became the youngest person to become an Eagle Scout.[L]:6 He joined the Marines after high school, and earned a Sharpshooter's Badge, Good Conduct medal, and Marine Corps Expedition medal.[L]:19 In 1961 Whitman was admitted to the University of Texas at Austin on a scholarship from the Naval Enlisted Science Education Program.[L]:19 While at UT, Whitman met and married his wife, Kathleen. Whitman struggled with gambling and bad grades, and he lost his scholarship in 1963.[3] Before the attack, Whitman had sought professional help for "overwhelming violent impulses",[2] including fantasies about shooting people from the tower.
As I recall, the school shootings started almost 20 years ago when a young teenager open fire on a group of praying students somewhere in Kentucky killing 3 and wounding others. School shootings since that time have become an epidemic. Some want to blame guns while others will blame mental illness. I say the guns and the mental illness are not the glaring problems, there are merely attributes to these school shootings. It’s high time those in a position to do something stop fooling themselves and start getting to the root of the problem and find out why youth today have become so disaffected that they are lashing out. Guns do not cause someone to kill, and one person’s mental illness does not a nationwide epidemic of school shootings make. The children today are being raised in a society that is blatantly moral corrupt and the kids have become disaffected because parents no longer teach them to “do unto others” and respect authority so that everyone can live with equal rights and exist in peace. We have let our society become morally bankrupt and the children today have lost faith in authority and due to the moral duplicity, they have become the victims and are lashing out. Anger and hate now reign supreme across out society and it has infected the kids. It is now up to everyone to give the kids the moral consistency and inspiration to find the right way in life. Are you reading this, Deckard?
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Replies to Comment # 3. All you anti gun AGENDA folk can eat my shat.
#5. To: GrandIsland, Y'all (#3)
Why is it that we didn't have school Shootings in the 60's, 70's or 80's if it's a gun issue?
#6. To: GrandIsland, worthless gov professionals (#3)
Why is it that we didn't have school Shootings in the 60's, 70's or 80's
University of Texas tower shooting (1966)
Charles Whitman (1963)
#7. To: GrandIsland (#3)
(Edited)
End Trace Mode for Comment # 3.
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