On Wednesday, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 people using a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle inside Marjory Stonemason Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Despite all the warnings and reports of Cruz’s threatening behaviors, nothing was done to stop him.
He talked about killing our parents, our friends, boyfriends and girlfriends. -Ariana Lopez
Now, Ariana Lopez, a student from Douglas High School and former friend of the shooter, revealed she reached out to school officials “multiple times” to report her concerns about Cruz’s behavior.
On Tuesday, during an interview with Good Morning America, Lopez admitted she was not surprised Cruz was the shooter as he constantly spoke about murdering people.
“He talked about killing our parents, our friends, boyfriends, and girlfriends,” Lopez said. “He would hit [his ex-girlfriend], he would threaten her, he would threaten her family and her friends, for talking to other guys.”
"He talked about killing our parents, our friends, boyfriends and girlfriends."
Former friend of Florida school shooting suspect speaks out to @VictorOquendo, saying she and her friends reported him multiple times: https://t.co/ZGimiAMj0m pic.twitter.com/gCCo4iEy4G
— Good Morning America (@GMA) February 20, 2018
The teen, who reported Cruz to school officials between 2016 and 2017, said there were a lot of red flags that simply got ignored. “He used to sell knives out of his lunchbox, which I thought was like insane because you can’t have knives ... [in] a school,” she said, adding, “He would talk about how he sympathized with Syrian terrorists and how people who opposed them should be killed.”
On Monday James and Kimberly Snead, the couple who took ho took Cruz into their home last November, told Good Morning America they were shocked to find out the 19-year-old was involved in the shooting. “Everything everybody seems to know, we didn’t know,” Snead said. “We had rules and he followed every rule to the tee ... He was very polite. He seemed normal.”
However, Lopez, who hid in a closet during the shooting, argues otherwise, saying, “Even before they announced that he was the shooter, we all knew it was Nik…He was the only person that we could think of that would do something like this because it was obvious that he had the power to do this.”
