Posted on 02/18/2018 1:40:43 PM PST by billorites
Nikolas Cruz was immature, quirky and depressed when James and Kimberly Snead took him into their Parkland home. But he was pleasant and seemed to be growing happier, they said.
How the 19-year-old turned into a killer still baffles them.
“We had this monster living under our roof and we didn’t know,” Kimberly Snead told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in an exclusive interview Saturday. “We didn’t see this side of him.”
“Everything everybody seems to know, we didn’t know,” James Snead said. “It’s as simple as that.”
Cruz still lived with the Sneads on Wednesday when he walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with an AR-15 rifle and killed 17 people — the worst school shooting since Sandy Hook.
Kimberly and James Snead took Nikolas Cruz into their home and let him live there for three months before the Parkland school shooting. (Staff Photographer Susan Stocker)
The Sneads’ son had asked whether his friend could move into their home last Thanksgiving. Cruz’s mother, who had adopted him, died of pneumonia Nov. 1, leaving him without parents. He stayed briefly with a family friend in the Lantana area but wanted to move on.
The Sneads quickly agreed — though they realized he was extremely depressed about his mother’s death. Prayer vigils to honor those killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
Vigils in around South Florida mourn the 17 killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on February 14, 2018 (Mike Stocker)
Five days before the shooting, Kimberly Snead took Cruz to the office of a therapist she has been seeing. Cruz said he was open to therapy but didn’t like medication. He took a business card and was figuring out what his health insurance would cover.
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
The police came to their house 39 times and that didn’t raise any suspicions ?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3633192/posts
Link for Texas school with armed (conceal and carry) teachers.
I’m a clinical psychologist, and frankly, I don’t know if most of the conduct and behavioral history I’ve read would meet an admission standard. Most of what we are reading is not supporting involuntary treatment in a locked facility.
In retrospect, he merited referral at several points. But would he have disclosed symptoms of a qualifying serious mental illness and would there have been significant functional impairement? At what point would the evaluators have found evidence that he met the criteria of dangerousness?
It’s interesting to read what people think might be going on with him. In some photos he does look like an FLK (funny looking kid), but I would have a hard time defending that as part of my diagnostic reasoning.
How he looks, sounds, smells, engages and responds in interviews, testing and evaluation actually matter more. Without seeing his medical and educational records, it is hard to see support most of the diagnoses. We use he said/she said to investigate, but we have to find evidence to support our conclusions, even when they are often provisional. By the way, there are usually several diagnoses over 5 areas.
The planning, logistics, and actions (to the extent I’ve read) seem very, if not exceptionally well organized. Too much so for much of what has been speculated. Autism and auspergers seem to be replacing ADD and ADHD as the disorder de jour. Not long ago in Sacramento, there was a near epidemic of childhood Bipolar disorder diagnoses (and concurrently there was a ongoimg university research project on that very subject.)
Many jail inmates report auditory hallucinations, some of those have reported hearing voices prior to arrest, but unfortunately not all practioners explore that issue adequately (it’s pretty easy to fake.)
I no longer believe a person needs to be mentally ill to commit crimes, including multiple murders.
I can’t address that, but it sounds like to you did a good job of it.
It is sad that so many warning signals were ignored.
Thanks. I’m not up on all of it.
Three months is a short period I’ll admit. It seems like a guy this “damaged” would have given some signals that would have prevented him from having the key to the gun lock-down, even so.
A good rule when letting a new person into your own would be to keep the key and evaluate over a period of time if he should have access. You don’t give access to a gun to a newcomer in your home.
These people are very lucky he didn’t start out his day killing them.
Fair enough. I hadn’t realized they only had him for 90 days before all this.
Still, don’t you think his attitude would have tipped them off somehow.
Maybe these folks aren’t very well tuned in.
I may be being too critical too.
Solomon, who was a lot smarter than you, described this type sans therapy:
“Come with us, let us lie in wait for blood;
let us ambush the innocent without reason;
like Sheol let us swallow them alive,
and whole, like those who go down to the pit;
we shall find all precious goods,
we shall fill our houses with plunder;
throw in your lot among us;
we will all have one purse”
—Proverbs 1
Jude simply labeled it “the way of Cain”. Envy and festering anger work together to produce murder. That’s what really happened here, however sad-sack the perpetrator.
When I was a sophomore my best friends step mom died. She lived with her dad and step mom. I guess she couldn’t stand to stay in their house anymore because she showed up at our house and basically just didn’t leave. My mom and dad never said a word about it.
Eventually she started staying at our house less and less.
“Reopen the insane asylums!”
According to JFK, Thorazine cured all the mentally ill! He signed the Community Mental Health Centers Act in 63.
Gave us the homeless and he made a mess of taking care on the mentally ill.
Privacy laws pushed by gay activist when HIV made the news in the early 80’s made the whole problem way worse. Commitment is damn near impossible these days.
It is strange how little they knew of him before allowing him to move in at the request of their son. Regarding the key to the gun cabinet, they said only they were to have a key, and they didn’t know he had made one. According to them, one of the house rules when he moved in was that he could only remove one of his guns from the cabinet with their permission, and with them unlocking it. They say he only asked permission twice during the 3 months he lived there; one time they said “yes” and the other time “no”. They say he was very obedient to all the house rules they set for him. If that’s true, he had to at least be mentally stable enough to fake how well he was following the rules for those 3 months. That, to me, would argue against an insanity defense.
Thanks for the detail.
It would reveal the same thing to me.
“He was older than 15 past the legal age”
Are you sure? From what I’ve read, his brother is still committed to a mental institution till this week when he turn 18.
If this kid has a brain he’ll stay there til this sorta blows over. If he decides to come out, I’d be worried.
Wonder what the period of time between his birth mother giving him up and his long term parents.
Reactive attachment disorder is strong in some institutionalized adopted kids. They don’t really seem to attach to their new family.
And the institutionalized brother in the mix. They had to be adopted together.
“Children view themselves as the center of their universe and the cause of events in their life”
LOL! Read my middle school and high school diaries when my daughter started to getting hormonal. I was so embarrassed. I can’t believe my parents let me live! LOL!
From what I understand it was for fighting.
In my work, it is easy to determine if a person was an unwanted baby. Memories begin at conception and are all intact no matter the current age of the person.
It is also easy to determine the relationship between the mother and father during pregnancy and the availability(or lack of) the father to the mother during pregnancy.
A baby in the womb can differentiate between being unwanted and rejected vs abandonment. They are two almost opposite responses in the child.
When I stimulate the memory of an unwanted child who is now an adult, it often knocks them backward off their feet. In addition, the person could me a Nobel Prize Winner or an Olympic Gold Medalist and still not feel “good enough” in their life. It does not matter if the parents were the best, most wonderful parents after the child was born as the perceptual programming event on the tabula rasa of the soul during pregnancy is the most impactful on the emotional perception applied throughout life.
I also identify the degree and type of trauma by the person’s relationship with their pets. Wounded souls tend to humanize their pets as they can’t trust the Love from humans.
The degree to which a person internalizes vs externalizes their consciousness is an important factor in later behavior patterns. For example, one person who internalizes may become a stalker while the next may be a murderer. Gender is an important factor.
Each individual is different based upon the many influencing factors.
Single parenting is one of the most dangerous negative influences on children due to the codependency that often forms between the single parent and the child, causing the child to develop into the complement of the parent rather than according to their birth gender.
psychiatric outpatient services, the liberal progressives do not want to lock these people away and treat them in a confined monitored environment this is considered cruel and unusual punishment so they allow mentally ill adults to roam free and take their medication responsibly, yeah right.
It is possible they simply weren’t attuned to his behavior. It does not read as if he had a lot of interactions with them.
Young folks deal with death the best they can on their own terms, I often have thought staying with those outside family members lets them do so... to stay with family they often feel the weight of others grief and a sense of staying strong for them.
POTUS Trump lived with them? Oh wait...
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