Parkland school shootings: Four minutes and a lifetime of trauma

Nikolas Cruz, the February 2018 Parkland school shooter, has his sentencing due on Tuesday, November 1, 2022. On Wednesday, a jury in Broward County court, Florida, recommended life sentence without parole for Cruz, much to the displeasure of the victim’s families present in the court.

The shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School killed 17 and injured 17, becoming the deadliest-ever school shooting in the US. The 1999 shooting at the Columbine High School that killed 15, became a close second.

It was the afternoon of February 14, 2018, Valentine’s Day.  

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At 2:18 p.m., Cruz’s friend Douglas Lewis received a message from Crux which simply said: Hey yo, hey whatcha doin? Lewis was in class, and earlier in the morning, Cruz had told him that he does not go to school on Valentine’s Day.  

A minute later, at 2:19 pm, Cruz arrived at the school, as per the police timeline of the events from that day. Wearing a maroon polo shirt with the logo of the school’s football team on it, he stepped out of an Uber with a long black bag – the case for his rifle and walked towards the school. 

It was an AR-15 sniper rifle, a military-grade weapon sold at sports goods stores in some parts of the US. 

In the next two minutes, Cruz walked to Building 12- where mostly classes for students in freshman year are held. The watchman saw him walking “purposefully” and altered another, but he did not call it Code Red or pursue the shooter. 

Also read: Nikolas Cruz victims list: All Parkland school shooting casualties

The building has three floors in which 30 classrooms are housed. On a normal day, there are 900 students and 30 teachers in the building. 

The police say that the first round of shooting begun at 2:21 p.m. in the hallway of the first floor of Building 12 where three people, all students, were killed. Cruz then open fired inside four classrooms on the first floor killing six more students. 

A few students led by teacher Scott Bigel had come out of their classrooms and gathered in the hallway. They heard a fire alarm, which the smoke from Cruz’s gun possibly triggered, and came out following the fire safety protocol they had practiced earlier on the same day. As it turned out, they had understood the emergency wrong, and before they could turn back, a bullet killed Bigel.

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Cruz then killed two staff members near the stairwell as he went upstairs to the second floor. He fired into two classrooms on the second floor but did not hit anyone. Then he went to the third floor and killed five students and a staff member.

He then came back to the ground floor and exited building 12. He attempted to shoot inside the teacher’s room from outside the windows but failed due to the hurricane-proof window panes.

It all happened within a span of only four minutes – the shooting stopped at 2:24 p.m. 

Cruz then escaped the scene by blending with fellow students who were fleeing the campus. A police officer, who was stationed there all the while, could not identify Cruz as he left.

Also read: Jury recommends life in prison for Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz

He later went to a subway where he had a soda, then spent time at a Mcdonald’s, and headed aimlessly in the direction opposite his home. Officer Michael Leonard identified the 5-foot-7, 120-pound teenager by matching it with the description he earlier received. 

It was 3:41 p.m., and Cruz did not resist as the officer dutifully put handcuffs on him.