Posted on 02/15/2018 8:13:56 AM PST by xzins
Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in Wednesday’s horrific massacre at a Florida high school, was allegedly reported to the FBI in September after he left a comment on a bail bondsman’s YouTube channel saying that he was going to be a “professional school shooter.”
The former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had previously been expelled for disciplinary problems prior to the mass shooting that left 17 people dead.
In a YouTube video published on the evening of the attack, Ben Bennight, a Mississippi bondsman, explained that he was contacted by the FBI at approximately 3 p.m. about a comment on one of his videos that he had reported last fall.
“The FBI just left my house in regards to this situation,” Bennight stated. “September 24th 2017, I sent a screenshot of a comment on one of my videos — now people keep asking me which video was it, but I don’t know, I don’t remember what video it was — when I saw the comment come through on my Studio app on my iPhone I screenshot the comment and hit the report button to report it to YouTube. Of course, they removed the comment.”
The video then scrolled through the screenshot and his report to YouTube.
Bennight proceeded to report the comment to the FBI.
“I looked up the number to my local field office and I called and left them a message. The next day I had two FBI agents standing in my office taking down the information and copies of the screenshot. They were asking me questions that of course I couldn’t answer. All it was on my channel was a comment, people leave pretty heinous comments on a pretty regular basis,” Bennight continued.
“This comment said ‘I am going to be a professional school shooter’ and I knew that I could not just ignore that,” he said. “I screenshotted the comment, I sent it to the appropriate authorities — and I imagine that from there they did a pretty thorough investigation and tried to find out who this person was,” he explained.
The bondsman continued on to explain that the YouTube comment did not come from an anonymous account, but from one with the name Nikolas Cruz.
“It wasn’t a generic screen name, the screen name was Nikolas Cruz — which I’m sure as you know by now, is the name of the guy that did the shooting in Florida today,” Bennight said.
Bennight explained that the first contact from the FBI today came in a phone call from his local field office shortly after the shooting. He stated that an agent called him, asked where he was and asserted that he was on his way to his house. Immediately after that, he says that he received a call from an agent from the Miami field office.
“I called him back and he’s like, ‘hey, you know, I’m just following up on a report that you made a couple months back’ — and I was like yeah, I just got off the phone with an agent over here,” Bennight said. “I emailed the Miami agent everything I had — well, everything I had was just that screenshot.”
Within an hour, the agent from his local office was at his home.
When the agent arrived at his home, he was questioned about if he had any previous contact with Cruz, which he says he did not. He was also questioned about how his report was handled at the time.
“I would like to think they were already investigating this guy and they had him at the top of their radar and that’s how they ended up contacting me so quickly,” Bennight said. “I wish I could have given them more information, but it was just a comment on my channel.”
The YouTube channel as well as all other social media belonging to Cruz appeared to have been taken offline by Wednesday evening.
Like all the other adolescent male school shooters, he was a known threat and had had contacts with “the authorities” before. Supposedly his adoptive mother (who died in September) tried to get some kind of treatment for him, but I don’t know exactly what it was and in any case it seems as if she hadn’t managed to make contact with anybody who could help him.
This latest killer, btw, was not supposed to be allowed on the campus “with a backpack.” So clearly he’d made threats that were known (he had once talked about bombing the school). But nothing serious was done.
I think one of the big problems is that neither the schools nor the parents have many options in what they can do. Once upon a time, there were great residential (and often involuntary) adolescent mental health facilities, but that went away as a result of one of those weird coincidences between left and right: conservatives (such as Reagan, who short-sightedly closed all of those places in California) didn’t want to pay for them, and liberals felt that these yutes were just expressing themselves and hey, who Is anyone, including his parents, to say he’s crazy and in need of help?
They were both short-sighted views that have had a huge cost, in every sense of the word, to our country.
Exactly! He was reported just like the Orlando shooter was reported and they waste time on investigating a made up crime instead of saving lives. The FBI is a broken organization that should be replaced.
We CAN’T give up our guns BECAUSE there are people like this shooter out there.
The FBI must have been using assets to mow down unarmed property owners or trying to undermine a sitting President. They’re busy, OK!
It's not rocket science. Even THEY can pull it off, again and again.
I don’t oppose steps to prevent or minimize such horrific acts as I wrote in an earlier post on another thread. However, “hardening” a target is not a perfect answer and it is very expensive - money that most school districts do not have. Finding alternative means of doing this such as qualified volunteers may have merit, but that may not be available in all jurisdictions either and also comes with risks.
I agree with you on the “triage” necessity. However, I am telling you from the inside (LE) that cops, the FBI, schools, nor mental health have the necessary tools or authority to simply incarcerate and fix every broken egg that crosses the pan. Giving them that authority does not guarantee success and it comes with risks to individual freedom that might be subject to abuse.
What are they (FBI) supposed to do?
That begs the question, since they had the shooter suspects name and his threat far in advance of this horrific event, what specifically did they do? What did the local cops do? What did the students and teachers do? They all knew far in advance or suspected this guy was a potential time bomb.
What do the authorities say every time this happens? “If ya see or hear something, report it! Regardless of how ya chop this up, the FBI looks incredibly bad here, if that’s even possible.
To buy a gun, you have to get a background check. Flag his SSN. Then the FBI can contact him again and ask, “Hey, we’ve already talked, and you said you were joking. What’s the deal with the AR-15?”
Then you report it to the local LEO’s that this guy, who’s made comments about shooting up a school, just bought an AR-15, and you ought to look into school resources officers, because this looks credible.
My kid jokes about shooting up a school if he doesn’t get BBQ chips in his lunch. He’s not trying to buy an AR-15.
It’s how you get from reasonable suspicion to probable cause. Saying you want to shoot up a school, using your own name on the post (who would do that?), and then going out to buy the gun (AR-15s aren’t cheap), are two different things.
I don’t believe in gun control, unless you mean lining up the shot to the extent you blow the shooter out of his socks while he is still in the parking lot.
This thread is confirmed by Fox News and many others.
There is no reason to take it off of breaking news.
It is the subject of Jay Seculow’s broadcast at this very moment.
It gets tons of hits, has people’s interest, and hits are important for FR.
Most of these large school systems have their own police force. There is a school system police substation in many of the high schools in my city. It’s pretty clear that schools, all schools must be guarded now. Or change the law and get these crazies off the street before they go off.
He did not intend to do any harm. The gun just went off all by itself.
Hardening the target MUST be the priority.
Who cares about the expense? Hire 3-6 more people per school. Get high tech scan equipment. But up concrete barricades. Install bullet proof glass. Have student id scans.
Salaries can be local and hardening can be state and federal.
No different than airports.
Ben Bennight had better be careful. He’s making the FBI look bad. He could become a target and “they have six ways from Sunday” to wreak revenge.
Yes, I trust TPTB to handle our national security with all the refugees and illegals here. /s
*
At the press conference in Florida this morning, the FBI agent said they did not find any information that led to the real identity of the person who made the threat.
That’s a lot of mumbo jumbo for we did not bother to write a search warrant for the website that he posted the threat on.
It would have taken just under an hour to write a search warrant for YouTube to give up the Internet service provider number and any other identifying information for the person who posted the threat.
And depending on which website was hosting the blog that he put the post on, it may have only required a subpoena not even a search warrant.
Unless some new information comes out that they identified him and interviewed him then the FBI really dropped the ball.
Another question is did the FBI think it was too low risk of a threat for them to deal with and did they then contact the local authorities who could have followed up on it?
Somebody should have done the little bit of extra work it would have taken to identify the person who posted the threat.
Which law enforcement agency who last had the information handed to them has some explaining to do.
Please see my post #137
The FBI likes to bait people into attempting to commit a crime, with the intent of then arresting them. Wouldn't surprise me in the least that this is one of these baiting attempts that got out of control. If it is, they'll of course cover it up. Much like the fiasco in Las Vegas.
Every celebrity or democrat who makes threats should be put on no gun list.The FBI and cops should demand a visit and make them as uncomfortable as possible.....Dem thugs get away with it ,so it continues day after day...
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