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After admitting the FBI failed to follow up on two tips that could have prevented a school shooting in 2018, the US government has agreed to pay $127.5 million to the families of 17 students killed.
Following Nikolas Cruz’s February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the federal government has reached a settlement with survivors and families of those killed.
Lawyers for 16 of the 17 killed at the high school in Florida and some of the wounded announced in November that they agreed to accept a monetary settlement from the government over the FBI failing to follow up on a tip a month before the shooting. The 17th family decided not to sue.
The government announced Wednesday that the settlement resolves a total of 40 cases related to the massacre. US officials have not admitted any fault in the settlement, according to a Justice Department news release.
The 2018 shootings were the worst mass shootings to hit a school in the United States since the terror at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 26 dead.
The FBI’s West Virginia tip line was notified five weeks before the February shooting when a former Stoneman Douglas student, Nikolas Cruz, 23, bought guns and planned to ‘slip into a school and start shooting the place up.’
‘I know he’s going to explode,’
The FBI was informed by the caller. Furthermore, Cruz admired ISIS, threatened his mother’s life, and mutilated small animals.
However, the FBI’s South Florida office was never notified of that information, nor was Cruz contacted. Expelled a year earlier, he was known for his emotional and behavioral problems.
‘The FBI could have and should have done more to investigate the information it was provided prior to the shooting,’ Deputy Director David Bowdich said at the time.
While we will never know if any such investigative activity would have prevented this tragedy, we clearly should have done more,’ he stated.
Secondly, a YouTuber provided the bureau with a comment Cruz had posted under a comment section on one of his videos. The message read: ‘I’m going to be a professional school shooter.’
When the FBI was contacted, it stated that ‘Nikolas Cruz’ was part of the user name, yet it was unable to confirm the identity of the poster.
Last October, the gunman pleaded guilty to 17 counts of first-degree murder and 17 counts of attempted murder after legally obtaining an AR-15 and using it during the shooting.
A penalty trial that is scheduled to start in April will result in either a death sentence or life in prison.
Attorneys for Cruz admit Cruz was behind the shooting, but claim he was too mentally deranged to be held responsible, and want him confined to a psychiatric facility for life.
In the aftermath of the shooting, the survivors of the shooting successfully lobbied the State Legislature into passing gun control legislation by founding Never Again MSD, a gun safety advocacy group.
At the time, Rick Scott, Florida’s governor, passed legislation authorizing the arming of teachers who were appropriately trained, and allowing the hiring of campus resource officers.
A student rally, ‘March for our Lives,’ also attracted hundreds of thousands to Washington, D.C. in March 2018.
A year prior to the mass shooting, then President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. In 2018, reports of why Trump may have fired him came out when Rudy Giuliani spoke to reporters about it.
Politico reported at the time:
Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday night said President Donald Trump fired James Comey because the former FBI director wouldn’t offer public assurances that Trump wasn’t a target of an investigation.
“He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation,” the former New York mayor, who recently joined Trump’s legal team, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “He’s entitled to that. Hillary Clinton got that and he couldn’t get that. So he fired him and he said, ‘I’m free of this guy.’”
Comey had previously said that he told Trump he wasn’t the focus of an investigation but that the president pressed him to make a public statement. The former FBI director said he never made a public statement for several reasons, including the possibility that Trump’s actions would eventually come under review by the FBI.
The president has changed his reason for firing Comey since he dismissed the former FBI director in May 2017. The White House initially said Trump fired Comey at the recommendation of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who penned a memo suggesting firing Comey over his handling of the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server.
However, several days later, the president told NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired Comey over the investigation into Russian collusion.
“When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,” Trump said at the time of the decision to dismiss Comey.
More recently, Trump tweeted in April that Comey “was not fired because of the phony Russia investigation.”
Source: The Republic Brief