Breaking News: The F.B.I. admitted it failed to act on a tip in January about the Florida suspect. The tipster said Nikolas Cruz had a “desire to kill.”
The F.B.I. received a tip last month from someone close to Nikolas Cruz that he owned a gun and had talked of committing a school shooting, the bureau revealed Friday, but it acknowledged that it had failed to investigate.
The tipster, who called an F.B.I. hotline on Jan. 5, told the bureau that Mr. Cruz had a “desire to kill people, erratic behavior and disturbing social media posts,” the F.B.I. said.
The information should have been assessed and forwarded to the Miami F.B.I. field office, the bureau said. But that never happened. On Wednesday, Mr. Cruz, 19, killed 17 students and teachers at his former high school in Parkland, Fla., law enforcement officials said.
The tip about Mr. Cruz appeared to be the second in four months, after another person told the bureau about online comments from Mr. Cruz that he wanted to become “a professional school shooter.”
The news comes as the F.B.I. is under considerable pressure over its investigation into President Trump, with frequent attacks focused on the work of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel’s office overseeing the inquiry into Russian election interference.
Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage
Opinion Op-Ed Contributor
The Things We Know About School Shooters FEB. 15, 2018
What to Do When There’s an Active Shooter FEB. 16, 2018
Recent Comments
Laura 2 hours ago
Of course the FBI has too many calls to follow up on. Our cowardly Congress people allow hundreds of millions of people to buy guns without...
Stephen 2 hours ago
Have we’ve forgotten about Las Vegas? There were no warning signs that the FBI could’ve reviewed. The Republicans as predicted seek to find...
Marc 2 hours ago
Considering how awful this lapse was, the FBI has a lot to answer for. Yes, you put the guy under the spotlight and let him know that...
See All Comments Write a comment
In an unusually sharp public rebuke of his own agents, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that the missed warnings had “tragic consequences” and that “the F.B.I. in conjunction with our state and local partners must act flawlessly to prevent all attacks. This is imperative, and we must do better.”
Rick Scott, the Republican governor of Florida, said the bureau’s failure to act on the tip was “unacceptable” and called for the bureau’s director, Christopher A. Wray, to resign. “Seventeen innocent people are dead and acknowledging a mistake isn’t going to cut it,” Mr. Scott said in a statement. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, also asked for Congress to investigate.
Mr. Wray said in a statement that he was “committed to getting to the bottom of what happened in this particular matter, as well as reviewing our processes for responding to information that we receive from the public.”
The F.B.I.’s admission opened up a new avenue of attack by conservatives who have questioned the impartiality of the bureau in its investigation into Russian intervention in the 2016 election.
“Last September, FBI was sent a screenshot of a comment by nikolas cruz,” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, said in a post on Twitter. “Unfortunately, the FBI was busy running down Clinton campaign leads about a nonexistent Russian conspiracy with Trump.”
It is not the first time that the F.B.I. has come under fire for being aware of a threat and failing to stop an attack.
Congress criticized the bureau for not preventing the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, in which the gunman was known to the F.B.I. The bureau also knew of one of the two brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. And Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in an Orlando, Fla., nightclub in 2016, had been investigated by the F.B.I. for months before the attack. That case was closed before the shooting occurred.
After those incidents, F.B.I. investigators compared themselves to hockey goalies, fielding a relentless barrage of pucks. Sometimes, they said, they could not keep things from making the net.
“The public expects the F.B.I. to keep them safe, and in the overwhelming majority of the instances, the F.B.I. does just that,” said Lauren C. Anderson, a former top F.B.I. official in New York.
source:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/fbi-nikolas-cruz-shooting.html?module=Notification&version=BreakingNews®ion=FixedTop&action=Click&contentCollection=BreakingNews&contentID=66535536&pgtype=Homepage&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur