PARKLAND, FL — Holding candles and each other, community members in Parkland, Florida, gathered Thursday night to honor the 17 people who were gunned down at the local high school.
As parents prepared funeral arrangements for their children, the father of one of the victims, Jaime Guttenberg, 14, spoke of his pain at Thursday’s vigil.
“I sent her to school yesterday,” Fred Guttenberg said. “She was supposed to be safe. My job is to protect my children and I sent my kid to school.”
“What is unfathomable is that Jaime took a bullet and is dead,” he paused, shaking his head. “I don’t know what I do next… We are broken.”
Latest developments
• Broward Sheriff’s deputies were called to the family home of shooter Nikolas Cruz 39 times since 2010. The range of emergency calls included: “mentally ill person,” “child/elderly abuse,” “domestic disturbance,” “missing person.” Details of those calls are not immediately available; most of them are marked “no written report,” so it’s impossible to know if they involved Cruz. The family home was sold in January 2017, according to property records.
• Cruz confessed to police to being the gunman, according to a probable cause affidavit. His public defender described him as a “broken human being” who is coming to grips with the pain he has caused.
• The shooter purchased the firearm used in the shooting, an AR-15 style rifle, legally in Florida nearly a year ago, according Peter J. Forcelli, special agent in charge of the Miami field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
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High school and Sandy Hook’s principals spoke
The Sheriff’s Office identified the 17 victims Thursday — which included three staff and 14 students. The school is closed for the rest of the week, as the district offers grief counseling to students and their families.
Ty Thompson, principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said he had spoken with the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School “who gave me some advise on how to move through this, because this is not something that’s in the playbook.”
“I got some good advice from him and we’re going to move forward and get past this,” Thompson said at the vigil. “As everyone’s been saying, this is a great community and we come together as family and I see no different in this scenario.”
The shooting is at least the fourth at US middle and high schools this year, and has reignited a debate over gun control. Some blame congressional inaction for the massacre while others say now is not the time for such political battles.
In the meantime, grieving families prepared for their loved ones memorial services and funerals.
“I just spent the last two hours putting [together] the burial arrangements for my daughter’s funeral, who’s 14!” one parent, Lori Alhadeff told HLN’s Mike Galanos.
Her daughter, Alyssa was killed.
“President Trump, you say what can you do? You can stop the guns from getting into these children’s hands,” Alhadeff said. “What can you do? You can do a lot! This is not fair to our families and our children [to] go to school and have to get killed!”
US President Donald Trump said he is making plans to visit Parkland to meet with families and local officials. He pledged to meet “the nation’s governors and attorney generals where making our schools and our children safer will be our top priority.”
What we know about the shooter
The shooter, Cruz is being held without bond after a brief hearing Thursday in Broward County court. He is charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder.
“He’s sad, he’s mournful, he’s remorseful,” said public defender Melisa Mcneill, who is Cruz’s lead defense counsel. “He is fully aware of what is going on. He’s just a broken human being.”
On Wednesday, Cruz entered the high school which he had once attended, around 2:21 p.m., according to a law enforcement timeline.
In minutes leading up to the shooting, Cruz had exchanged texts with the son of his host family, who had opened up their home to Cruz after his mother had died last year. Their son is a current student at the high school, who was there during the shooting.
They were messaging right up until 2:18 p.m., said Jim Lewis, attorney for the host family.
The texts were “very innocuous,” Lewis said. “They were just conversations about ‘Hey, what are you doing? What are you doing later? What’s goin’ on?'”
“Nothing that would lead you to believe this young man, Nick was about to do such a horrible thing,” the family attorney said.
After the shooting, Cruz fled the building by blending in with evacuating crowds. He left and bought a drink at a Subway store, then sat at a McDonald’s for a few minutes, the timeline states.
Investigators identified Cruz from school security videos and he was detained about 40 minutes later.
Cruz had been expelled from Stoneman Douglas high school over disciplinary problems, according to Broward County Public Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie.
Cruz had posted a variety of gun and violence-related postings on social media sites. Posts under videos on YouTube and other sites by someone using the name Nikolas Cruz include threatening comments, such as “I whana shoot people with my AR-15” (sic) and “I wanna die Fighting killing sh** ton of people.”
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