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.
September24th? Wasn’t that before his mother died?
I don’t understand. Are they trying to say it wasn’t Cruz?
I too remember boys bringing their rifles to school, even on our rural school bus, and not one of us batted an eye. My own brother probably brought his to school for hunting safety classes.
Our country needs to finally open up many mental institutions again, and lock these violent evil nuts up.
You brought up a great point.
I have a CCW permit. About 2000, I bought a nice bolt action and got flagged because a Berkeley professor with my same first and last name was a dufus. He was arrested for breaking into a lab and releasing a bunch of lab animals.
He resides in California, I at the time was in Nebraska. I got flagged because I was in a college town, and that was listed as something my stupid doppelganger might do.
If you have a guy who is homicidal, been reported to the FBI and other LEAs, nothing happens because of HIPPA laws. If you let a monkey go in some lab in Cali, I have to get a pistol license just in case they think I am a gay animal rights professor.
The ability to track these people is there, it is not being utilized.
Hold on now! Wasn’t this Florida school shooter a DACA baby?
The FBI dropped the ball on the muzzie brothers who blew up the Boston Marathon too.
They didn’t care enough to even talk to this evil sh*thead Cruz. The social media stuff he posted was outrageous and way over the limit of what our gov’t should dismiss as not alarming.
As others said, the Obama FBI is too busy trying to take down Trump (and real Americans who support him), to notice obvious dangerous individuals. Cost a lot of lives yesterday.
So many in the media keep saying...”oh of course the vast majority of FBI are great,,,,it’s just the 7th floor that got corrupt”,,,.
B.S.
There are plenty more who are not faithfully doing their jobs and are partisan hacks from the previous islamic anti-American administration.
Federal Govt is not responsive enough to local issues.
He even looks deranged.
Add that to his social media violence, and anyone with a brain can see he was going to kill a lot of people.
Yet our gov’t did nothing. Failure at all levels up to the FBI.
What will it take before those who run schools admit they need armed good guys to shoot back at these monsters...
And then we learn that he was reported. The person who alerted the FBI to Cruz was interviewed, but then, astonishingly, the FBI did not interview Cruz.
The gov’t fails again. Too lazy, uninterested, and too in pursuit of partisan politics, to prevent this loss of innocent lives.
That sums it up well.
I no longer have any positive regard for the FBI.
Yesterday cemented my opinion, which has been forming for the last couple years as they try to damage our President.
Sorry you had to live next to one of them. I am sure many have a very arrogant attitude...like Pelosi and many others who are so full of themselves as they get paid huge amounts of money to look down upon those who pay their salaries.
Good question. He does look more than run of the mill “odd”.
Years ago I saw a documentary on children adopted from horrible Russian orphanages. They had no basic human bonding as babies/youngsters, and therefore had no feeling for human beings. They lacked the necessary loving bonds with parents and many grew up to be very dangerous adults.
Guess who closed the mental institutions? The LIBs, of course. Mainly, they did this because they were fearful that they would be discovered as lunatics and be placed there against their will.
Some people have suggested that provoking then observing might have been the reason for the “Sydney siege” at the Lindt cafe. Many people reported the gunman to the authorities in the weeks leading up to this event. He was making raving threats. He was also before the courts on other charges but got bail.
Supposedly Cruz was in a White Nationalist group so I doubt it
Closing the institutions was so bad.
It’s probably nearly impossible to get someone “committed” now.
Libs ruin every last thing they touch.
Just heard the same thing about an association to some White supremacists on GayNews9. If it’s true and he’s ultimately sentenced to death let’s see how many on the left would would pontificate on the immorality of capital punishment,not that this POS won’t deserve it regardless of his effed up beliefs
I just read on another web site where someone wrote:
Well, the FBI couldn’t do anything but interview him.
My point is, maybe that would have scared the little twerp into re=thinking his plans.
I swear it sounds like the media got trolled but north Florida is eat up with White Nationalists.
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