The real problems started at least as early as middle school and quickly intensified...vocal outbursts, disturbing drawings of stick figures with guns, constant disciplinary issues, threatening statements written on his homework and scrap paper, including a reference to killing President Barack Obama, saying he should be “burned alive and eaten.” Some teachers banned Nikolas Cruz from their classrooms, barred from bringing a backpack to the school and that security personnel had to search him to ensure he didn’t have weapons....increasing behavioral challenge for the school system...long string of escalating disciplinary measures throughout his academic career for insubordination, profanity, disruption, fighting and assault. “I can say I was so uncomfortable around him, I did not want to be alone with him in my classroom,”
His middle school and high school teachers referred him to individual and family counseling, the records show. They held parent conferences and called social workers. They sent him to in-school suspension, and they sent him off campus. For a time, they sent him to a school for emotionally disturbed youth. Finally, after he was disciplined for an assault at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, they asked for an assessment of the threat he posed to his school, and ultimately he was expelled, about a year before he returned with a gun.
well-known to school and mental health authorities
“What we have gathered so far looks to us like this is a complete multi-system failure, that you had the school system failed . . . you had the mental health system failed,” Finkelstein said. “When he went to purchase a gun, that system failed. . . . The FBI failed. When you look at it, this should never have happened.”