After President Trump called the Parkland, Florida high school shooting suspect “mentally disturbed,” adding that people should have reported his behavior in order to prevent Wednesday’s massacre, a source told CNN that’s exactly what happened. According to the report, the FBI was warned that 17-year-old Nikolas Cruz was a potential threat nearly five months ago in September in relation to his troubling social media posts. Indeed, a YouTube video blogger reported an “alarming comment” he’d left on a post. A YouTube user named “Nikolas Cruz” wrote, “Im (sic) going to be a professional school shooter.”
The FBI was warned in September about a possible school shooting threat from a YouTube user with the same name as the suspect in Wednesday's campus massacre in Parkland, Florida, according to a video blogger https://t.co/rkdwiTOajf pic.twitter.com/4LXmxGCNNN
— CNN (@CNN) February 15, 2018
According to CNN, the YouTube blogger, Ben Bennight, reported the comment to the FBI and was subsequently interviewed by several agents:
Bennight emailed a screenshot of the comment, which he shared with CNN, to what he thought was an FBI tip line, but the email address was invalid, he said. Bennight said he followed up with a phone call to the FBI. The comment on YouTube has since been pulled down.
According to Bennight, agents from the FBI’s field office in Mississippi contacted him and came to his office to conduct an in-person interview the next morning. Bennight told the agents he didn’t know anything about the user, he told CNN.
The in-person interview with Mississippi field agents “was the last contact he had with the FBI until Wednesday.” FBI agents in Miami and Mississippi called Bennight to followup with him following the shooting. “I saw the story kind of go across my newsfeed but I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it,” he told CNN. “But when the FBI said it was the same name the first thing that went through my mind was, ‘Wow, I hope you were at least watching this guy that I alerted you to months ago.'”
(Via CNN)