Lawyers for the family with whom accused shooter Nikolas Cruz had been living released text messages they received from the shooter moments before the massacre occurred, and they paint a chilling picture of what happened that fateful Valentine’s Day.
Attorney Jim Lewis represents the Snead family, in whose home the shooter was living at the time of the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre.
Lewis passed the documents to The Palm Beach Post on Wednesday, the same day that a grand jury indicted the shooter on 34 counts, 17 counts of premeditated first-degree murder for those who were killed and 17 counts of premeditated first-degree attempted murder for those he allegedly wounded.
According to The Post, the texts began at about 2 p.m., when the shooter “texted the Sneads’ teenage son, who was in class at Douglas, around 2 p.m., about 20 minutes before the shooting began.
“Cruz asked what class the son was in and who the teacher was. The son said the teacher was one of the coaches. Cruz texted the son to ask the coach if he remembered Cruz. The coach was not one of the people Cruz shot.”
“Minutes later, Cruz texted to say he was going to a movie. Lewis said he then ‘made some kind of comment that, ‘I’ve got something big to tell you.” When the son pressed him, Cruz texted, ‘no big deal. Nothing bad.’
“Lewis said the texting stopped at 2:18 p.m. The last text was a single word: ‘Yo.’ The Snead teen texted back several times without a response. Then, the shooting started.”
“There was nothing to give any clue that this was about to happen,” Lewis said.
“No bad feelings about anybody’s school. No bad feelings about Douglas in general.”
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However, more details began to emerge that again looked an awful lot like red flags. The accused shooter and his brother were left orphaned after their adopted mother died last November of pneumonia.
The two moved in with family friend Roxanne Deschamps, who kicked Cruz out when he refused to get rid of his guns. That’s why he eventually moved in with the Sneads.
Lewis also revealed that James Snead had asked the school, which had expelled Cruz, whether he could re-enroll. The school said no.
However, the chilling takeaway from the tweets is just how blasé that Cruz was before he allegedly perpetrated one of the most heinous crimes of recent years.
Yet, this all didn’t have to happen. If law enforcement had done its job — either at the federal or at the local level — this shooting could have been stopped or mitigated.
We’ll likely find out more in the coming days, weeks and months, but there’s almost nothing that could change that fact, that none of this had to happen if people would have just done their job.
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via Conservative Tribune
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