At funerals and in the streets of Parkland, a suburb on the edge of the Everglades, anger bubbled over at the senselessness of the shooting and at the widespread availability of guns. A rally to support gun-safety legislation was scheduled for Saturday at the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale.
During a funeral Friday for 18-year-old Meadow Pollack, her father looked down at his daughters plain pine coffin and screamed in anguish as Gov. Rick Scott and 1,000 others sat in Temple Kol Tikvah.
"I wasn't able to do anything about it. I have always been able to protect my family," he said.
"Our kids should be safe." Not long after that funeral, the FBI said it received a tip last month that Cruz had a "desire to kill" and access to guns and could be plotting an attack, but agents failed to investigate. The governor called for the FBI director to resign.
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The comment posted by a "Nikolas Cruz" said, "I'm going to be a professional school shooter." The FBI investigated the remark but did not determine who made it.
In more evidence that there had been signs of trouble with Cruz, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said his office had received more than 20 calls about him in the past few years. Cruz was being held without bail at the Broward County Jail on 17 counts of first-degree murder.
Authorities have not described 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 USD 600,000.
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