Suspect confessed to Florida school attack, carried extra ammo and fired for 3 minutes: police
February 16, 2018 by admin
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The teenager accused of using a semi-automatic rifle to kill 17 people at a Florida high school confessed to carrying out one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings and carried extra ammunition in his backpack, according to a sheriff’s department report released Thursday.
Nikolas Cruz told investigators that he shot students in the hallways and on the grounds of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, north of Miami, the report from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office said.
Cruz said he brought more loaded magazines to the school and kept them in the backpack until he got to campus.
As the gunman moved through the school, he fired into five classrooms — four on the first floor and one on the second floor, Sheriff Scott Israel said.
The shooting lasted for three minutes. The assailant then went to the third floor and dropped his AR-15 rifle and the backpack and ran out of the building, attempting to blend in with fleeing students, Israel said.
After the rampage, the suspect headed to a Wal-Mart and bought a drink at a Subway restaurant before walking to a McDonald’s. He was taken into custody about 40 minutes after leaving the McDonald’s, the sheriff said.
A day after the attack, a fuller portrait emerged of the shooter, a loner who had worked at a dollar store, joined the school’s ROTC program and posted photos of weapons on Instagram. At least one student said classmates joked that Cruz would “be the one to shoot up the school.”
The 19-year-old orphan whose mother died last year was charged with murder Thursday in the assault that devastated this sleepy community on the edge of the Everglades. It was the nation’s deadliest school attack since a gunman targeted an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years ago.
Meanwhile, students struggled to describe the violence that ripped through their classrooms just before the school day ended.
Catarina Linden, a 16-year-old sophomore, said she was in an advanced math class Wednesday when the gunfire began.
“He shot the girl next to me,” she said, adding that when she finally was able to leave the classroom, the air was foggy with gun smoke. “I stepped on so many shell casings. There were bodies on the ground, and there was blood everywhere.”
State Sen. Bill Galvano visited the high school Thursday and was allowed to go up to the third floor, where he was shown bullet holes that marked where Cruz had tried to shoot out the windows at point-blank range. But the high-impact glass did not shatter.
Authorities told Galvano that Cruz apparently wanted to shoot out the windows so he could fire on the students running away from the school. Police told Galvano that it was not that difficult to open the windows.
“Thank God he didn’t,” Galvano said.
Among the dead were a football coach who also worked as a security guard, a senior who planned to attend Lynn University and an athletic director who was active in his Roman Catholic church.
The last of the bodies were removed from the high school Thursday after authorities analyzed the crime scene. Thirteen wounded survivors were still hospitalized, including two in critical condition.
Authorities have not offered any specific motive, except to say that Cruz had been kicked out of the high school, which has about 3,000 students and serves an affluent suburb where the median home price is nearly $600,000. Students who knew him described a volatile teenager whose strange behavior had caused others to end friendships with him.
Cruz was ordered held without bond at a brief court hearing. He wore an orange jumpsuit with his hands cuffed at his waist. His attorney had her arm around Cruz during the short appearance. Afterward, she called him a “broken human being.”
He was being held under a suicide watch, Executive Chief Public Defender Gordon Weekes told reporters.
Wednesday’s shooting was the 17th incident of gunfire at an American school this year. Of the 17 incidents, one involved a suicide, two involved active shooters who killed students, two involved people killed in arguments and three involved people who were shot but survived. Nine involved no injuries at all.
As the criminal case began to take shape, President Donald Trump, in an address to the nation, promised to “tackle the difficult issue of mental health,” but avoided any mention of guns. Trump, who owns a private club in Palm Beach, about 40 miles from Parkland, said he planned to visit the grieving community.
He did not answer shouted questions about guns as he left the room.
Trump, who did not speak publicly immediately after the shooting, weighed in on Twitter early Thursday, calling the suspect “mentally disturbed” and stressing that it was important to “report such instances to authorities, again and again!”
In the case of Cruz, at least one person did report him.
FBI agent Rob Lasky said the FBI investigated a 2017 YouTube comment that said “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” But the agency could not identify the person who made the comment, which was from an account using the name Nikolas Cruz. It was left on a YouTube video of a blogger and bail bondsman from Mississippi named Ben Bennight.
In a Buzzfeed article , Bennight said he called the FBI, and agents came out to talk with him. They called him again Wednesday.
Officials were also investigating whether authorities missed other warning signs about Cruz’s potentially violent nature.
He had been expelled from the school for “disciplinary reasons,” according to the sheriff, who said he did not know the specifics.
One student said Cruz had been abusive to his ex-girlfriend and that his expulsion was over a fight with her new boyfriend.
Math teacher Jim Gard told the Miami Herald that Cruz may have been identified as a potential threat before Wednesday’s attack. Gard believes the school had sent out an email warning teachers that Cruz should not be allowed on campus with a backpack.
The leader of a white nationalist militia called the Republic of Florida said Cruz was a member of his group and had participated in exercises in Tallahassee. Jordan Jereb said he had only a brief interaction with Cruz a few years ago. The group wants Florida to become its own white ethno-state.
Neither the Leon County Sheriff’s Office in Tallahassee nor the Southern Poverty Law Center could confirm any link between Cruz and the militia.
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Arrests of immigrants with no criminal record spike in LA
February 15, 2018 by admin
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Immigrants taken into custody who have no criminal history are on the rise in Southern California as they are around the nation, according to data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Early last year, President Trump lifted Obama-era policies that kept immigration agents focused on criminals. Since then, administrative arrests of immigrants in the Los Angeles region with no known criminal background have more than tripled.
According to immigration officials, 834 non-criminal arrests were made locally between January 2017 and last September, compared with 244 during the same period in 2016. Local arrests of immigrants with criminal records rose slightly from 5,444 during January to September 2016 to 5,829 in the same period a year later.
The numbers include arrests in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
Nationwide, non-criminal arrests in the interior of the U.S. rose from 5,014 to 13,744 between fiscal years 2016 and 2017.
The arrests reflect the Trump administration’s focus on enforcement in the interior of the country as arrests at the border have fallen dramatically. The administration has also stepped up “at-large” arrests in communities around the country as many local jurisdictions, including California and cities like Los Angeles, have become less willing to cooperate with immigration authorities.
The stepped up enforcement follows the president’s campaign promise to deport any unauthorized immigrant, estimated at 11 million people in 2015.
An ICE report on arrests and deportations for fiscal 2017 cites a Trump executive order from January 2017 that gave Homeland Security free rein to arrest any deportable immigrant. ICE officials wrote, “the Department has directed that classes or categories of removable aliens are no longer exempted from potential enforcement.”
“ICE is very clear,” said Louis DeSipio, a University of California, Irvine political scientist who studies immigration policy. “They don’t have the limits now that they had in the previous administration. Under President Obama, certainly later in his term, ICE focused its energies on folks with outstanding orders of deportation and individuals with serious criminal convictions.”
Emily Robinson, co-director of Loyola Law School’s Immigrant Justice Clinic in Los Angeles, said she’s been seeing more arrests of individuals with no criminal history since the inauguration last year.
Most of these are “individuals who are either collateral to an arrest of someone who might have criminal issues or other immigration violations, or individuals who have been seized for no reason at things like ICE check-ins or in community spaces,” Robinson said.
Last year, KPCC reported on a jump in the reopening of deportation cases involving people who had no criminal history and whose cases had been administratively shelved by the Obama administration.
The fear that no one is safe from deportation has rattled immigrant communities, Robinson said.
“For the most part, people are so afraid that they won’t even go to the grocery store,” she said. “They are afraid to take their kids to school.”
ICE officials said they are doing their job to maintain public safety.
“The FY2017 statistics clearly demonstrate ICE’s continued commitment to identifying, arresting, and removing aliens who are in violation of U.S. law, particularly those posing a public safety or national security threat, while restoring fidelity to the rule of law,” according to the arrests report.
While arrests are up nationwide, overall removals from the country for fiscal year 2017 are down from the previous year. ICE officials cite a drop in border arrests for this decline while noting that deportations for immigrants arrested in the interior of the country are up, from 65,332 to 81,603.