By Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
We’ve all heard the security warning from law enforcement and politicians: “If you see or hear something, say something!” When that fails, we hear “run, hide, fight” as alternative advice if you are unfortunate enough to be caught in a mass shooting, or automotive rampage.
But what happens when the first warning doesn’t produce results?
On Feb. 14 we got the answer when Nikolas Cruz, 19, shot and killed 17 students and teachers at his former high school in Parkland, FL, according to law enforcement officials.
Cruz walked away but was later apprehended and charged. He has since pleaded guilty to the shooting.
But what is becoming apparent after that tragedy is that authorities had been warned that Cruz was dangerous at least four times over the last year and a half.
In the latest instance, the FBI received a tip in January from someone close to Cruz that he owned a gun and had talked of committing a school shooting, the bureau revealed on Feb. 16. But the FBI also acknowledged that it had failed to investigate.
The tipster, who called an FBI hot line on Jan. 5, told the bureau that Cruz had a “desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting,” the FBI said, according to the New York Times.
The information should have been assessed and forwarded to the Miami FBI field office, the bureau said. But that never happened.
The tip about Cruz appeared to be the second the FBI had received in recent months, after another person told the bureau about online comments from Cruz that he wanted to become “a professional school shooter.”
In an unusually sharp public rebuke of his own FBI, Attorney General Jeff Sessions later said that the missed warnings had “tragic consequences” and that “the FBI in conjunction with our state and local partners must act flawlessly to prevent all attacks. This is imperative, and we must do better.”
Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said the bureau’s failure to act on the tip was “unacceptable” and called for the bureau’s director, Christopher A. Wray, to resign.
“Seventeen innocent people are dead and acknowledging a mistake isn’t going to cut it,” Scott reportedly said in a statement. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) also asked for Congress to investigate.
Wray said in a statement that he was “committed to getting to the bottom of what happened in this particular matter, as well as reviewing our processes for responding to information that we receive from the public.”
However, this is not the first time that the FBI has come under fire for being aware of a threat and failing to stop an attack.
Congress criticized the bureau for not preventing the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, in which the gunman was known to the FBI. The bureau also knew of one of the two brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. And Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub in 2016, had been investigated by the FBI for months before the attack. That case was closed before the shooting occurred.
After those incidents, FBI investigators compared themselves to hockey goalies, fielding a barrage of pucks.
While a former FBI official described the response to the tip on Cruz as a “tragic failure,” she also said that the past 18 months had been extremely difficult for the FBI.
Broward County, FL, Sheriff Scott Israel was sympathetic to the FBI’s problem. “At the end of day, make no mistake about it, America, the only one to blame for this killing is the killer himself,” Israel said.
Cruz, a volatile youth who became an orphan when his mother died in November, had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
He legally purchased the AR-15 rifle he admittedly used in his rampage, after passing a NICS background check.
The earliest known tip to the FBI came from a bail bondsman in Mississippi who told the FBI in September about a worrying comment left on his YouTube channel from a “nikolas cruz” saying “Im going to be a professional school shooter.
Agents from the FBI Jackson, MS, field office looked into the comment but could not identify who had posted it from database and open-source searches, the bureau said.
However, the FBI was not the only law enforcement agency to be warned about Cruz. Sheriff Israel said on Feb. 16 that his office had received about 20 calls regarding the suspected school gunman over the past few years.
And the New York Times later reported that a Florida social services agency had investigated warnings about Cruz a year and a half before the shooting and found he was a “low risk of harming himself or others.”
None of these investigations put Cruz on the NICS database as a prohibited person because there was no conclusive legal finding, so he was able to buy an AR-15 for his criminal act, showing once again, as in other similar cases, the very limited value of background checks as a useful gun control measure.,
Contrast what was done in the Cruz case with a report from the Buffalo News that immediately following news of the Broward County school shooting, New York State Police did respond to people “saying something” by committing three youth, aged 15 to 17, to hospitals for mental examinations.
The warnings had come from three different and separated Western New York area schools south of Buffalo. The State Police did investigate and decided that all three teens be temporarily committed to mental health facilities.
It may be too early to tell if the State Police actions were correct, and maybe we’ll never really know.
We also have no way of knowing how many other alarms were sounded successfully across the nation because authorities were warned because someone said something.
But we do know that if someone says something, the authorities need to follow up on all such warnings, otherwise the people who claim they “serve and protect” us aren’t earning their salaries.