The local sheriff’s office received at least 18 calls about Florida school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz over the past decade — including warnings that were passed on to the disgraced school deputy who failed to stop the massacre, according to a damning new report.
Records of calls about Cruz to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office reveal that in February 2016, neighbors called to say they feared he “planned to shoot up the school” after posing for Instagram photos with firearms, USA Today reports.
The information was passed on to the sheriff’s on-site officer at Stoneman Douglas High School, Deputy Scot Peterson — who resigned Thursday following revelations that he’d done nothing to intervene when Cruz stormed the school last week and slaughtered 17 people.
It’s not clear what Peterson did with that 2016 report — if anything. Cruz remained at the school for another year, before he was transferred out for threatening other students.
After Cruz’s mom died in November last year, another caller phoned to say the teen was stockpiling guns and knives, and the person was “concerned [Cruz] will kill himself one day and believes he could be a school shooter in the making.”
But because Cruz had moved to a different county, the deputies told them to call the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office instead.
A relative also called in the wake of the mom’s death asking the office to take away Cruz’s guns. A deputy responded and reported that a “close family friend” had agreed to take the guns, according to the records.
In all, five of the calls specifically referenced Cruz’s access to weapons — but none led to a direct intervention with the boy.
The Broward sheriff’s office did involve mental health professional after some calls — but still none resulted in Cruz being committed for his increasingly twisted acts and outbursts.
A counselor was called in after his own mom phoned in 2013 to say he’d thrown her against the wall because she took away his Xbox — but the shrink determined that he didn’t need to be institutionalized, according to the paper.
And another mental health worker assessed Cruz in September 2016 after Deputy Peterson heard from a school counselor that the teen had tried to kill himself by drinking gasoline, was cutting himself, brandishing hate symbols and wanted to buy a gun “for hunting.”
But that counselor also decided not to recommend committing him — as did a simultaneous state investigator, the records show.
The sheriff’s office is has opened two internal investigations into how it handled the calls that specifically mentioned school shootings, and has placed two deputies, Edward Eason and Guntis Treijis, on desk duty.