Following Roger’s death in 1996, Lynda was left to her own devices in raising her two adopted sons and the trouble with Nikolas began shortly thereafter. For instance, according to one news report, “When Cruz was 10 years old, his mother called the police to the house. That call was the first of dozens of times over the next decade she would summon law enforcement for help keeping her sons under control” (Murphy Cautious after Parkland Shooting, 2018, p. A4). Moreover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) admitted that it dropped the ball in the Cruz investigation despite clear indications that this young man was planning on committing mass murders (Jarrell, 2018).
While it is easy enough to assign blame for the mass shootings that occurred on February 14, 2018 to the community-based resources including social workers, law enforcement officials including the FBI who were supposed to prevent such occurrences, many young American males exhibit oppositional defiant behaviors that are regarded as being a normal part of the maturation process (Apsche & Bass, 2009) and the dozens of 911 calls from Cruz’s mother were simply disregarded as a result.
Compounding the tragedy was the lackluster and ineffectual responses by law enforcement authorities to the situation that occurred at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. For example, according to Greene (2018), “The school resource officer on duty when a gunman killed 17 people at a Florida school found a safe spot outside the building — and did absolutely nothing” (para. 1). Besides investigating the responses by other Broward County sheriff deputies for their failure to intervene, Floridian lawmakers are demanding the suspension of the Broward County Sheriff, Scott Israel, for what they regard as “incompetence and neglect of duty" following revelations that the sheriff’s office, like the FBI, simply ignored or underestimated the significance of the dozens of warnings signs that should have been readily discerned and acted upon (Quinn, 2018).
When he entered his high school, Cruz was armed with an assault rifle, an AR-15 (see Figure 1 below), available nationwide for under $800 which is essentially a knockoff of the M16 that was a staple weapon during the Vietnam War (Nehamas & Smiley, 2018).
Figure 1. Representative AR-15 assault rifle similar to the one used by Cruz
Source: https://aeroprecisionusa.com/media/catalog/product/
Indeed, the AR-15 assault rifle is a deadly weapon and authorities report that the death toll might have been far higher if Cruz’s weapon had not jammed or…
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