School shooter’s trouble started in middle school

The couple who offered Nikolas Cruz a place to live just months before he killed 17 people at a South Florida high school said they had no idea about the extent of his behavior issues. “We had this monster living under our roof and we didn’t know,” Kimberly Snead told the Sun-Sentinel in an interview published in the South Florida newspaper Sunday. “We didn’t see this side of him.” Snead and her husband James allowed Cruz to live with them after his mother died in November. Although they knew he had a gun, the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used in the school massacre, they required him to keep it in a locked cabinet. James Snead said he thought he had the only key. The Sneads described Cruz as polite and said he obeyed all their rules, a drastically different picture of the teen than the one that has emerged in the days since Wednesday’s shooting. According to school and government records, Cruz had disciplinary issues starting in middle school. In the eighth grade, administrators transferred him to a special school for students with emotional and behavioral issues. In the 10th grade, he transferred to Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, where administrators expelled him last year. A Florida Department of Children and Families investigator visited Cruz and his mother in 2016. He eventually closed the case, even though a school counselor voiced concern about Cruz’s desire to buy a gun. A crisis counselor who visited the school said he did not believe Cruz posed a danger to himself or others.