When the Cruzes first moved into this affluent neighborhood in Parkland, Fla., they seemed like a model family — an older couple raising two adopted young boys.
Then the father, Roger, died. And the boys began a reign of terror on the neighborhood that lasted years.
Nikolas Cruz, the older brother, was especially moody, prone to an explosive temper and seeming to delight in torturing animals and provoking everyone else on the block.
He killed squirrels with a pellet gun. He stole neighbors’ mail. He tried to get his dog to attack and bloody the pet piglets being raised in the house across the street. He picked fights with other kids constantly, biting one kid’s ear. He threw rocks and coconuts, vandalized property. He lurked at late hours along drainage ditches that run alongside the back yards of every house on this block. One neighbor caught him peeking into her bedroom window.Residents said they called police constantly. Every other week, it seemed, police cruisers would pull up to the house to sort out the latest complaint.
“Just about everybody on this part of the street had a run-in with him. He was always getting into trouble, that kid,” said longtime neighbor Malcolm Roxburgh. “He was not right in the head.”
Things only seemed to get worse, recently. Over the past year, he was expelled from school for disciplinary problems. Many of his acquaintances had cut ties in part because of his unnerving Instagram posts. His mother, among the only people with whom he was close, died around Thanksgiving. He was living at a friend’s house. He was showing signs of depression.
And Cruz, 19, had a fascination with guns. He owned an AR-15 assault-style rifle.
Although school officials, students and others who knew him were aware that something was off with Cruz, it is unclear whether anyone had a full picture of what was building within him in recent months. Had everyone who knew of his struggles sat down in a room and compared notes about his recent past, perhaps an alarm would have sounded ahead of what emerged on Valentine’s Day, when Cruz allegedly walked into a suburban South Florida high school and carried out one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings“Weird” was the word students had used to describe Cruz since middle school. At first “it was nothing alarming,” said Dakota Mutchler, 17, who attended middle school with Cruz, adding that there was something “a little off about him.” But that was it — for a while.
As Cruz transitioned into high school, he “started progressively getting a little more weird,” Mutchler told The Washington Post. Cruz, he said, was selling knives out of a lunchbox, posting on Instagram about guns and killing animals, and eventually “going after one of my friends, threatening her.”
On Wednesday night, Mutchler recalled Cruz as an increasingly frightening figure, being suspended from school repeatedly, before he was expelled last year. “When someone is expelled,” Mutchler said, “you don’t really expect them to come back. But, of course, he came back.”He came back to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with a vengeance, according to the Broward County sheriff, who identified Cruz as the gunman who marched through the school with an AR-15 assault-style rifle, killing 17 people and wounding at least 15 others. He has been booked on 17 counts of premeditated murder.Mutchler spoke as he stood outside a Marriott Hotel where families and students had been told to gather so they could find one another and go home. Still looking dazed, the young man also spoke with the benefit of hindsight.
Brody Speno, 19, grew up with Cruz and attended Riverglades Elementary and Westglades Middle School alongside him. When Cruz was in third or fourth grade, Speno remembers watching him try his best to use a pellet gun to kill a squirrel. His affinity at killing animals grew. Speno said he was seen shooting at chickens owned by a resident.
Cruz owned at least two dogs, but neighbors said he trained them to be weapons. Several said Cruz would take his dog to the house across the street where another neighbor raised a pet potbelly pigs, and Cruz would try to get the dog attack and kill the little piglets. Another neighbor recalls watching Cruz trying to kill a squirrel and feed it to his dog. A fourth neighbor recalled Cruz taking a stick to rabbit burroughs, trying to ram it down as hard as he could to kill any bunnies inside.
“People were afraid of him,” Speno said, who watched over the years as Cruz become increasingly bizarre, withdrawn and hostile. “We waited for the bus every day together at a bus stop.”
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