“No one in the country has been through what we’ve been through,” the coach told his Evergreen High School football team. “Everybody has your back. Everybody.”

His Cougars leaned closer. It was 15 minutes to 7 p.m. About a half-hour earlier, they warmed up at Severance High School’s football stadium under low clouds, shaking off three weeks of rust and two weeks of angst while mosquitoes nipped at their calves.

was going over film with his quarterbacks inside Evergreen High on Sept. 10 when he heard shots down the hall. A gunman had opened fire inside the building, wounding two students before taking his own life.

Friday night was the Cougars’ first game back. Their coach took a deep breath. A smile came and went. Every few seconds, the call sheet attached to his waist would rattle as he turned, breaking the silence.

“The last two weeks,” Van Praag said, “have been unlike any team that’s been here before.”

He reminded them that they were together. That they were safe. That they were loved. He raised both arms out wide and pointed to the 28 faces staring back at him, battered but unbowed.

“I believe,” Van Praag said softly. The call sheet rattled again. “I believe in you.”

‘It felt like an eternity’

The voices we hear at our darkest moments, hands extended from hope, are the ones that stay with us forever.

Matt’s son Declan is a freshman wide receiver and defensive back on the Cougars roster. On Sept. 10, just as the school went into lockdown, the teen was supposed to be watching film next door. But dad had no idea if his son was in the room, or heaven forbid, somewhere else.

Van Praag texted assistant coach Chris Post.

Is Declan OK?

Post messaged back.

Yes, he’s OK. Everything’s all right,

“This coaching staff, they’re just amazing human beings,” Matt recalled later. “We have people from all walks of life. We don’t have any coaches in the building.

“And so for us to have been there and for my son to be with Coach Post, I felt that he was going to be OK. And that (Post) was going to do whatever he could to protect his kid, just like I was going to do whatever I could to protect the kids that were in my room.”

Declan told me he doesn’t remember much. He saw nothing. He heard plenty.

“We had to barricade the door,” Declan said, “and then got to the corner and just waited for the authorities to show up.”

“They said it was not too long of a time,” Declan said, “but it felt like an eternity in there.”

The only thing crueler than life sometimes is its ironies. One of the elder Van Praag’s friends and confidants is a football coach in Florida by the name of George LePorte. LePorte taught chemistry at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018 when a shooter arrived on campus and killed 17 people.

“You really need to connect with each individual player,” LePorte told Van Praag recently. “Because everyone is going to be at a different place.”

Longtime Columbine football coach Andy Lowry reached out. So did the Columbine booster club. Severance offered signs, memorials and a moment of silence. Evergreen officials respectfully declined. The most important thing, they said, was getting normalcy again.

Both schools agreed on a small, personal gesture — a blue, heart-shaped sticker on the back of the Silver Knights’ helmets that featured the Cougars’ logo, the Severance logo, and three words: UKnighted For Evergreen.

“In our program, we are so lucky,” Van Praag said. “Our motto every year is THL — Trust, Honor and Love.

“We are going to love these kids. And once we get to that love piece, they trust us implicitly. And so they will come to us and talk to us (to say), ‘Coach, I’m really struggling.’ As a coach, that’s the greatest compliment you can get. If we have a 15-, 16-year-old kid saying, ‘I love you,’ that’s a big deal for us. We want to get them to that place. And our team is there.”

‘Getting back to football has helped’

The football side is still, understandably, coming along. Slowly.

In their opening offensive series at Severance, the Cougars punted after three plays. Then again, after another three.

The offense sputtered. The defense wore down. The rust was real. Assistant coach Ryan Jensen, the Fort Morgan native and a Super Bowl champ with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, mislaid his hat before the game and had to borrow someone else’s.

Severance used a second-quarter surge to take a 22-0 lead into halftime. The Silver Knights eventually pounded out a 32-0 win before a giddy, glittering homecoming crowd.

Van Praag wouldn’t make excuses after the game. So we will. Over the previous fortnight, the Cougars have practiced at four different sites — the Broncos’ indoor complex, Chatfield High, a local junior high, and their own facility.

Every day was a scramble drill. Severance prep this past week involved two different fields. Kids were padding up at home, padding up in restrooms, dressing and changing wherever they could.

“We prepared well, we liked our plan, but the last two weeks — it’s a struggle,” Van Praag told me. “You’re not practicing on your own home field. And I think we’re going to scrap this and move on quickly. But our kids are resilient; they’ve been great. I have no problem with the effort or what they did. These kids have been through a lot.”

“I mean, for us — we don’t need to watch this film. We know this wasn’t us. This is a wash. We move on. We’re two games from conference play. We have a game next week, and then we’re into conference play. That’s what we have to get ready for.”

They lost a game. They got their normal back. On a long journey home, the first step is often the heaviest.

“I think as much as it can, it felt like a normal football game,” Declan said. “Severance came out and played as hard as they could, which was nice. I’m glad they didn’t show anything different to us. I think we played our hardest, and it was good to get out there.”

How are you doing?

“Getting back to football has helped a lot,” Declan said. “Being able to just feel normal with everything, seeing my teammates, being able to even practice at our own fields, getting back to normal, it’s felt really good.”

As Declan spoke, a player, eye black smudged, hair sopping, stopped and hugged his father tightly. THL.

The coach never stopped believing. And everybody still had their backs. Everybody.

“We love this group,” Van Praag said. The call sheet was gone. The smile returned. “We’ll be back on our field next week. We’ll be back in our building. The routine will be back to normal. That’s the thing that’s most important. And we’ll be OK.”

Given the magnitude and devastation of the tragedy, I believed that surely our nation would mobilize to implement scientifically informed actions that could reduce mass violence.

I was wrong.

The tragedy of mass violence persists, and sadly the numbers keep growing. School shootings have already reached a record single-year high in 2022, with 40 in the United States as of Oct. 30, killing 34 people and injuring 88.

Shortly after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, our center launched a research-based initiative called Safe Communities Safe Schools to support school and district teams in implementing a comprehensive approach to school safety.

Recently, we partnered with the National Association of School Resource Officers and other school safety experts to develop Project Unite, a training program for multidisciplinary school safety teams to implement integrated school violence prevention strategies. The best violence prevention begins early and continues through childhood and adolescence, and we have a registry of experimentally proven programs to prevent violence throughout life.

We estimate if we could put these programs, practices, and integrated systems into place to scale, we could substantially reduce the likelihood of serious violence and offer enormous cost savings to society.

However, these efforts are currently not well-funded nor widely implemented. The majority of tax dollars spent go to policing, incarceration, and reactive strategies rather than to preventing the problem from happening in the first place.

When we study the events and circumstances leading up to school shootings, we repeatedly find the same patterns.

People knew something was wrong with the person prior to their attack, but they did not know who to tell, how to tell them, or how to intervene. In these retrospective studies, we find many missed opportunities to address the warning signs in the shooter. In our study of the Arapahoe Shooting in Colorado in 2013, we identified 27 missed opportunities to intervene, and in the Parkland Shooting, there were at least 69 missed opportunities.

A key violence prevention strategy focuses on developing integrated systems to identify and address behavioral warning signs for violence. These systems include bystander reporting and response, information sharing, behavioral threat and suicide risk assessment and management, and coordinated school- and community-based mental health services.

We also know that building a positive culture and climate in our schools and communities is foundational for effective violence prevention. For example, a positive school climate benefits individual students and the overall school environment by fostering relationships that promote healthy youth development, prevent problem behavior and encourage bystander reporting. In these environments, trusting, respectful, and caring relationships are prioritized; youth and adults care about and watch out for each other, and exclusionary discipline practices are reduced.

Admittedly, the availability of firearms is a key societal factor that accounts for high homicide rates in the U.S. compared to other western countries. Yet, the sole focus on firearm access leads us to ignore other violence prevention solutions.

The solutions we collectively advocate for are part of a comprehensive public health approach that addresses the root causes that fuel violence. This approach includes upstream prevention strategies that promote safety and well-being for everyone and interventions to support those that are at risk for violence or exhibiting violent behaviors.

It is easy to feel powerless in the face of the horror of mass shootings. But we know what works. We know how to address this problem. It¶¶Òőap time to act.

Beverly Kingston, Ph.D., is the director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado Boulder.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

The video, compiled from 13 security cameras inside the building, was not shown to the gallery, where parents of many of the victims sat. Shown later to reporters, it depicts Cruz crouching and stalking in a left-handed shooter’s stance, firing at anything that moves, down the halls and into classrooms.

He shoots many of his victims at point-blank range, going back to some as they lay wounded on the floor to kill them with a second volley of shots. In one segment, athletic director Chris Hixon bursts through a door to confront Cruz, but is wounded and falls. He crawls behind a pillar. Cruz kills him with a blast as he passes.

The 12 jurors and 10 alternates stared intently at their video screens as it played. Many held hands to their faces as they viewed the 15-minute recording, which has no sound.

Some started squirming. One juror looked at the screen, looked up at Cruz with his eyes wide and then returned to the video.

Cruz looked down while the video played and did not appear to watch it. He sometimes looked up to exchange whispers with one of his attorneys.

The video was played over the objection of Cruz’s attorneys, who argued that any evidentiary value it has is outweighed by the emotions it would raise in the jurors. They argued that witness statements of what happened would be sufficient.

Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer dismissed the objection, saying a video that accurately reflects Cruz’s crimes does not unfairly prejudice his case. Prosecutors are using the video to prove several aggravating factors, including that Cruz acted in a cold, calculated and cruel manner.

Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of first-degree murder, and 17 more counts of attempted murder for those he wounded. The jury must decide if he should be sentenced to death or life without parole for the nation’s deadliest mass shooting to go before a jury.

Later during day two of the trial, jurors heard testimony from Christopher McKenna, who was a freshman during the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting. He had left his English class to go to the bathroom and exchanged greetings with two students, Luke Hoyer and Martin Duque, as they crossed paths in the first-floor hallway. McKenna then entered a stairwell and encountered Cruz assembling his AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

Cruz, who had been expelled from Stoneman Douglas a year earlier, had come onto campus through a gate that had been opened for the end of the school day in about 20 minutes carrying the gun in a bag.

“He said get out of here. Things are about to get bad,” McKenna recalled.

McKenna sprinted to the parking lot as Cruz went into the hallway and began shooting. McKenna alerted Aaron Feis, an assistant football coach who doubled as a security guard. Feis drove McKenna in his golf cart to an adjacent building for safety, and then went to the three-story building McKenna fled from.

By then, the sounds of gunfire were already ringing out across the campus. Feis went in and was fatally shot immediately by Cruz, who had already killed Hoyer, 15, and Duque, 14, and eight others. Cruz then continued through the second floor, where he fired into classrooms but hit no one.

When he reached the third-floor, the video shows, Cruz found students and teachers in the hallway, preparing to evacuate. He fires at them as they try to run away. Two girls, 18-year-old Meadow Pollack and 14-year-old Cara Loughran, fall wounded. He shoots them again as he passes.

Peter Wang, 15, fell mortally wounded by the door. Jaime Guttenberg, 14, made it through the stairwell door before she fell.

Cruz would soon run past their bodies, out onto the athletic fields and mingle with the fleeing students, speeding past two girls carrying Valentine’s Day balloons. He would be captured about an hour later in a neighborhood 3 miles (5 kilometers) away.

The jurors also heard testimony from English teacher Dara Hass, who ad three students killed and several wounded in her classroom when Cruz fired through a window in the door.

“The sound was so loud. The students were screaming,” said Hass, who wept and dabbed her eyes with tissue as she testified. She thought it might be a drill, but then she spotted the body of 14-year-old Alex Schachter, who had been fatally shot at his desk.

“That¶¶Òőap when I saw it wasn’t a drill,” she said. Two 14-year-old girls also died in the classroom: Alaina Petty and Alyssa Alhadeff.

When police arrived and evacuated her students, Hass said she did not want to leave but officers convinced her.

“I wanted to stay with the students who couldn’t go,” she said, referring to Schachter, Petty and Alhadeff.

One student in her class, Alexander Dworet, said he originally thought the loud bangs were the school’s marching band, but then he felt a “hot sensation” on the back of his head where he had been grazed by a bullet and “I realized I was in danger.” He and other students scrambled away from the window, using Hass’ desk as a barrier.

Dworet¶¶Òőap 17-year-old brother, Nick, was across the hall in his Holocaust studies class. Cruz fired into that classroom, too, killing him.

Associated Press writer Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this report.

More than 120 of the first 160 prospective jurors who filed through Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer’s courtroom on Monday were dismissed. Most said it would be impossible for them to serve from June through September. That¶¶Òőap the amount of time it is expected to take for lawyers to present their cases in a trial that will end with a jury deciding whether Cruz gets life in prison or a sentence of death for murdering 17 at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.

A few were dismissed because of health issues, because they don’t speak English fluently or because they had already paid for extensive vacations.

A woman was dismissed when she began crying upon seeing Cruz — not a new occurrence; that also happened to three women at an October hearing. Another prospective juror had a personal connection to Scherer, having taught her how to roller-skate as a child. Yet another had met Cruz in 2016 on a group outing, while one woman was excused after saying she couldn’t serve on a jury because she needed to meet up with her “sugar daddy” every day.

“I’m seeing double. I’ve seen a lot of people,” Scherer said at the end of the day. “For Day 1, things went rather smoothly.”

Cruz, 23, sat between his attorneys, wearing a gray sweater and an anti-viral face mask, four sheriff’s deputies sitting nearby. He spoke only briefly at the start of the hearing, waiving his right to participate directly in the screening process. He pleaded guilty in October, meaning the jury will only decide if he gets death or life without parole.

Eight parents and other family members of some victims sat together in the courtroom. They declined to comment as they left.

Approximately 1,500 potential jurors, perhaps more, will be screened over the next few weeks as the pool is pared down to 12 plus eight alternates in a three-step process that will run through the end of May.

In the first screening, they are only being asked about hardships and conflicts. With the exception of the woman who met Cruz, they were not asked on Monday for their opinions about the death penalty or whether they could be fair. Those who said they could serve were given questionnaires to fill out in another room. The questionnaires will be given to lawyers in advance of the next round.

One prospective juror said she met Cruz in 2016 when she went with a group of friends to a lake cabin for a weekend and an acquaintance invited him along. The woman, who appeared to be in her early 20s, said she had few interactions with Cruz, but he seemed perhaps “mentally not together.” She was dismissed after saying she could not envision many circumstances where she would even consider voting for a life sentence.

Scherer seemed taken aback when one prospective juror said serving would be a financial hardship because she has to visit her “sugar daddy” daily. Scherer asked her to repeat what she said. She did. Scherer had her held over after dismissing other jurors. Under questioning, she repeated that again. She was finally dismissed. One prosecutor then called her “wacky.”

The Parkland shooting is the deadliest in the U.S. ever to make it to trial. Seven other U.S. killers who fatally shot at least 17 people died during or immediately after their attacks, either by suicide or at the hands of police. The suspect in the 2019 massacre of 23 at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart is still awaiting trial.

Death penalty trials in Florida and much of the country often take two years to start because of their complexity, but Cruz’s was further delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and extensive legal wrangling.

Tony Montalto, whose 14-year-old daughter, Gina, died in the attack, said before Monday’s hearing that the trial “has been a long time coming.”

“I just hope everyone remembers the victims,” he said. Cruz, he said, “told the world his plans on social media, carried out those plans in a cold and calculated manner and murdered my beautiful daughter, 13 of her classmates and three of her teachers.”

The parents and spouses of victims who have spoken publicly said they are in favor of Cruz’s execution. Montalto has not answered the question directly, but has said on multiple occasions that Cruz “deserves every chance he gave Gina and the others.”

When the prospective jurors who pass the initial screening return for individual questioning several weeks from now, both prosecutors and the defense can challenge any for cause. Scherer will eliminate candidates who lawyers from either side have convinced her would be prejudiced against their side. Each side will also get at least 10 peremptory strikes, where either can eliminate a candidate for any reason except race or gender.

For Cruz, a former Stoneman Douglas student, to get the death penalty, the jury must unanimously agree that aggravating factors such as the number of people he killed, his planning and his cruelty outweigh such mitigating factors as his lifelong mental illness and the death of his parents.

If any juror disagrees, Cruz will receive a life sentence.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Four years after 17 people were gunned down at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, families and gun control advocates are pressing President Joe Biden to do more to address gun violence.

One father of a victim killed in the shooting sent an early morning tweet Monday, the anniversary of the Parkland shooting, saying that he’d climbed a 150-foot-tall (46-meter-tall) crane near the White House.

“The whole world will listen to Joaquin today. He has a very important message,” the father, Manuel Oliver, said in a video tweeted at about 6:50 a.m., referring to his son, Joaquin Oliver. “I asked for a meeting with Joe Biden a month ago, never got that meeting.”

Oliver unfurled a sign that showed a photo of his son and criticized Biden for gun deaths on his watch. Police were called to the scene, where at least two people were on the crane. They said later that three people were taken into custody but didn’t identify them.

Meanwhile, dozens of advocates were set to rally outside the White House and unveil a website chronicling the 47,000 gun deaths and 42,000 gun injuries in the country since Biden was inaugurated. The tracker also lists the number of young people killed and injured as well as the number of mass shootings in the same time frame, and it includes a feature allowing users to publicly call on Biden and other administration officials to act against gun violence.

“As a candidate, Joe Biden promised to prioritize gun violence prevention. As president, Joe Biden has not,” said Igor Volsky, founder and executive director of the group Guns Down America.

In his first year in office, Biden’s efforts to pass legislation to tighten gun laws haven’t left the drawing board. He also was forced to pull his nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The group is calling on Biden to stand up a national office to address gun violence and to make a new nomination to head the ATF.

Biden said in a statement before the planned protest that the movement to end gun violence is “extraordinary.”

“We can never bring back those we’ve lost. But we can come together to fulfill the first responsibility of our government and our democracy: to keep each other safe,” he said. “For Parkland, for all those we’ve lost, and for all those left behind, it is time to uphold that solemn obligation.”

Since the Parkland shooting left 14 students and three staff members dead, gun violence at schools has only risen. There were at least 136 instances of gunfire on school grounds between Aug. 1 and Dec. 31, according to a tally last week by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.

Biden has acted to crack down on “ ghost guns,” homemade firearms that lack serial numbers used to trace them and that are often purchased without a background check. He has worked to tighten regulations on pistol-stabilizing braces like the one used in a Boulder, Colorado, shooting that left 10 people dead. He’s also encouraged cities to use their COVID-19 relief dollars to help manage gun violence. But these efforts fall far short of major change.

There are limits to what the president can do when there is no appetite in Congress to pass gun legislation. The strongest effort in recent years failed, even after 20 children and six adults were killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Parkland happened six years later.

Biden, a Democrat, said he’s asked members of Congress to provide funding to help reduce violent crime and said they must pass legislation requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers.

The U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center studied school attacks nationwide from 2006-18 and reported that most attackers were bullied and that warning signs were there. Most important, the researchers said, about 94% talked about their attacks and what they intended to do in some way, whether orally or electronically, and 75% were detected because they talked about their plots. About 36% were thwarted within two days of their intended attacks.

___

This story has been corrected to show 14 students and three staff members, not 17 students, were killed in Parkland, Florida.

Relatives of the victims who sat in the courtroom and watched the hearing via Zoom shook their heads or broke down in tears as Cruz entered his pleas and later apologized for his crimes.

“Today we saw a cold and calculating killer confess to the murder of my daughter Gina and 16 other innocent victims at their school,” Tony Montalto said. “His guilty pleas are the first step in the judicial process but there is no change for my family. Our bright, beautiful, and beloved daughter Gina is gone while her killer still enjoys the blessing of life in prison.”

The guilty pleas will set the stage for a penalty trial in which 12 jurors will determine whether Cruz, 23, should be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole. Given the case’s notoriety, Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer plans to screen thousands of prospective jurors. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Jan. 4.

Cruz entered his pleas after answering a long list of questions from Scherer aimed at confirming his mental competency. He was charged with 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted first-degree murder for those wounded in the Feb. 14, 2018, attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, located just outside Fort Lauderdale.

As several parents shook their heads, Cruz apologized, saying, “I’m very sorry for what I did. 
 I can’t live with myself sometimes.” He also added that he wished it was up to the survivors to determine whether he lived or died.

Anthony Borges, a former Stoneman Douglas student who was shot five times and severely wounded, told reporters after the hearing that he accepted Cruz’s apology, but noted that it was not up to him to decide the confessed murderer’s fate.

“He made a decision to shoot the school,” Borges said. “I am not God to make the decision to kill him or not. That¶¶Òőap not my decision. My decision is to be a better person and to change the world for every kid. I don’t want this to happen to anybody again. It hurts. It hurts. It really hurts. So, I am just going to keep going. That¶¶Òőap it.”

Cruz’s attorneys announced his intention to plead guilty during a hearing last week.

Following the pleas Wednesday, former Broward State Attorney Mike Satz recounted the details of the murders. Cruz killed 14 students and three staff members on Valentine’s Day 2018 during a seven-minute rampage through a three-story building at Stoneman Douglas, investigators said. They said he shot victims in the hallways and in classrooms with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. Cruz had been expelled from Stoneman Douglas a year earlier after a history of threatening, frightening, unusual and sometimes violent behavior that dated back to preschool.

The shootings caused some Stoneman Douglas students to launch the March for Our Lives movement, which pushes for stronger gun restrictions nationally.

Since days after the shooting, Cruz’s attorneys had offered to have him plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, saying that would spare the community the emotional turmoil of reliving the attack at trial. But Satz rejected the offer, saying Cruz deserved a death sentence, and appointed himself lead prosecutor. Satz, 79, stepped down as state attorney in January after 44 years, but remains Cruz’s chief prosecutor.

His successor, Harold Pryor, is opposed to the death penalty but has said he will follow the law. Like Satz, he never accepted the defense offer — as an elected official, that would have been difficult, even in liberal Broward County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 2 to 1.

By having Cruz plead guilty, his attorneys will be able to argue during the penalty hearing that he took responsibility for his actions.

The guilty plea would set up a penalty phase where Nikolas Cruz, 23, would be fighting against the death penalty and hoping for life without parole.

Attorneys for Cruz told Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer that he will plead guilty Wednesday to 17 counts of first-degree murder in the February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The pleas will come with no conditions and prosecutors still plan to seek the death penalty. That will be decided by a jury, but that trial has not been scheduled.

Cruz will also plead guilty to 17 counts of attempted first-degree murder and to attacking a jail guard nine months after the shooting. He was not present during the hearing.

The trial has been delayed by the pandemic and arguments between the prosecution and defense over what evidence and testimony could be presented to the jury. Some victims’ families had expressed frustration over the delays, but the president of the group they formed expressed relief that the case now seems closer to resolution.

“We just hope the system gives him justice,” said Tony Montalto of Stand With Parkland. His 14-year-old daughter, Gina, died in the shooting.

The decision by Cruz and his attorneys to plead guilty came unexpectedly. Preparations were being made to begin jury selection within the next few months. He had been set to go on trial next week for the attack on the Broward County jail guard.

Cruz and his lawyers had long offered to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, but prosecutors had repeatedly rejected that deal, saying the case deserved a death sentence.

Cruz’s rampage crushed the veneer of safety in Parkland, an upper-middle-class community outside Fort Lauderdale with little crime. Its educational crown jewel is Stoneman Douglas, a campus of 3,200 students that is one of the top-ranked public schools in the state.

Cruz was a longtime, but troubled resident. Since preschool he had been treated for emotional problems and was known by neighbors for torturing animals. Broward sheriff’s deputies were frequently called to the home in an upscale neighborhood he shared with his widowed mother and younger brother for disturbances, but they said nothing was ever reported that could have led to his arrest. A state commission that investigated the shooting agreed.

Cruz alternated between traditional schools and those for troubled students. In one year of middle school, he averaged three disciplinary incidents per month.

He attended Stoneman Douglas starting in 10th grade, but his troubles remained — at one point, he was prohibited from carrying a backpack to make sure he didn’t carry a weapon. Still, he was allowed to participate on the school’s rifle team.

He was expelled about a year before the attack after numerous incidents of unusual behavior and at least one fight. He began posting photos online of himself with guns and made videos threatening to commit violence, including at the school. It was about this time he purchased the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle he would use in the shooting.

When Cruz’s mother died of pneumonia in November 2017, four months before the shooting, he began staying with friends, taking his 10 guns with him.

Someone, worried about his emotional state, called the FBI a month before the shooting to warn agents he might kill people. The information was never forwarded to the agency’s South Florida office and Cruz was never investigated or contacted.

Another acquaintance called the Broward Sheriff’s Office with a similar warning, but when the deputy learned Cruz was then living with a family friend in neighboring Palm Beach County he told the caller to contact that sheriff’s office.

In the weeks before the shooting, Cruz began making videos proclaiming he was going to be the “next school shooter of 2018.” Shortly before the massacre, he made one where he said, “Today is the day. Today it all begins. The day of my massacre shall begin.”

The shooting happened on Valentine’s Day, minutes before the end of the school day. Students had exchanged balloons, flowers and other gifts and many were dressed in red.

Cruz, then 19, arrived at the campus that afternoon in an Uber, assembled his rifle in a bathroom and then opened fire on students and staff members, the smoke from his rifle setting off the fire alarm.

Outside the building, sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson, the school’s longtime resource officer, heard the shots but did not enter the building — he drew his gun and hid behind a column and wall, video shows. He told investigators he did not know where the shots were coming from, but they said his radio transmissions show he did.

Peterson has been charged with felony child neglect for allegedly failing to protect the students and perjury for allegedly lying to investigators. He has pleaded not guilty and proclaimed his innocence in interviews. He resigned shortly after the shooting before he could be fired.

Cruz eventually dropped his rifle and fled, blending in with his victims as police officers arrived and stormed the building. He was captured about an hour later walking through a residential neighborhood. Later that night, he confessed to detectives.

A state investigation found numerous security lapses not just at Stoneman Douglas but at schools statewide. The shooting led to a state law that requires all Florida public schools to have an armed guard on campus during class hours.

___

Associated Press reporter Curt Anderson in St. Petersburg, Florida, contributed to this story.

Many years ago, the NRA was the nation’s advocate for gun safety and hunting.  The “Field & Stream” NRA turned into the “Call of Duty” NRA when they figured out that they could monetize the 2nd Amendment by co-opting the Republican Party.  Now,to protect their cash-cow, the NRA has a troll farm that cranks out these beauties all day.

Survivors, their loved ones, the loved ones of the murder victims, and activists in the community can expect the following from pro-gun activists and trolls:

What part of “shall not be infringed” do you not understand?

What part of “well regulated” do you not understand?  These last four words of the 27 words of the 2nd Amendment are the only words some of them see.

(A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.)

It¶¶Òőap too soon to be talking about laws – time to let the families mourn.

This is a ‘kick the can down the road’ distraction from the minds of the NRA marketing team. The theory is that something else will happen before it¶¶Òőap the “right time” to talk about this, and the distance of time will distract and detract from what needs to be done (i.e. meaningful change).  It doesn’t take long to dull our senses post-tragedy.

Laws won’t prevent shooters. There are already too many guns available.

The correct laws will prevent the wrong people from buying guns. Laws requiring insurance for gun ownership will get the insurance industry involved in cleaning up the mess.  A law requiring a psych evaluation (preferably repeated every year or two) would prevent at least some of this.  The fact that you’ve allowed guns to overproliferate in our country doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something to stop it from continuing.

We need to complete the investigation; let the justice system play out.

Because this has worked so well in the past.  Again, delay tactics play out in their favor, as the national attention will die down and shift to something else very quickly.

If there had been a good guy with a gun….  

A great marketing tool created in the NRA’s former marketing lab.  This was designed to sell more and more guns.  Everyone everywhere ought to have a gun, as if this would have a meaningful chance to prevent this type of tragedy.  Why not arm the bagboys while we’re at it?  Same logic as “arm the teachers.”

This is the result of mental illness due to gay marriage (or some other so-called societal ill).

Here’s a great way to pander to religious conservatives.  Blame some kind of un-biblical behavior for the very behavior and attitude that the NRA and its acolytes have suborned for decades.  But passing laws that will address the issue of mental illness vis a vis gun ownership would be anti-American, of course.

“Thoughts & prayers”

Anyone who says this is either completely ignorant as to its origin, meaning and uselessness, or, more likely, is pandering to a specific set who believe that the utterance of words like these has any meaning whatsoever. The likelihood “thoughts & prayers” will make any impact on anything has been disproven in every possible way.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” or “Guns are inanimate objects.”

You can’t have mass shootings without the use of guns, so that argument is moot.

“‘Assault’ is a verb, rifles don’t assault people.”  Also, “Define an assault weapon for me.  I’ll wait.”

There is a class of weapons referred to as “assault rifles.”  There are many different definitions of what constitutes an assault rifle, and these gun over-enthusiasts know it.  They’re trying to trap you into admitting that you wouldn’t know how to define this term, but don’t worry — neither do they.  It¶¶Òőap complicated, but the Clinton administration was able to institute an assault rifle ban in 1994, so ignore this distraction.  The “I’ll wait” part is designed to make them feel like they’re smarter than you are.  hey’re not.

To summarize, there are vile, sick people out there who fear that their perceived rights are going to be taken away, and that the only way to preserve them is to harass and intimidate you and people like you.  Don’t fall for it!  They’re full of bluster, but when push comes to shove most of them are just keyboard warriors.

Jeffrey Kasky is the father of two survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14, 2018. 

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

But the best part of walking into Umba was being greeted by Lonna’s warm and welcoming smile as you were enveloped in her kindness and radiant light. Even through her mask you couldn’t miss Lonna’s smile.

When I walked into Umba just a couple of weeks ago, never for a moment did I think the conversation would be our last. We chatted about living through an entire year without live music, and how excited we were to put on our dancing pants and get back to the scene. Because of the pandemic, I didn’t hug her before leaving the store. COVID be damned, I’ll never hesitate to give another hug.

Lonna was killed along with nine other beautiful souls on Monday. A mass shooting at the Table Mesa King Soopers stole Lonna from us. It has devastated my beloved Boulder community.

Those are words I never thought I would say. Not because I thought my idyllic city, nestled in the foothills of Colorado, was immune. I know far too well that no place in America is immune to gun violence. But there’s a difference between knowing something in your head and believing it in your heart — and no way would I ever let myself believe it could happen here. Now it has.

I spent years with the Everytown Survivor Network working to stop gun violence. I’ve been down this road more times than I want to remember. There are far too many lives to honor, so much senseless killing that weighs heavy on my heart. After every mass shooting since Aurora, I held the hands of survivors, hugged them, cried with them. I know their incomprehensible grief, their journey through unimaginable heartbreak and anger, and how they summoned the courage to demand change. And now, they are reaching out to comfort me. It¶¶Òőap the most ironic twist of fate — but tragically not unexpected.

It¶¶Òőap been a year of tremendous loss. Loss of getting together with friends and loved ones, loss of jobs, loss of hugs, loss of life. And now, just as we are finally beginning to emerge from the darkness, an old, familiar darkness set in. We’ve been so ready to get back to normal, to freely live our lives, we somehow forgot the price of freedom.

While we took pause, isolated in our homes, away from schools, places of worship, and large social gatherings, something else took pause — the all-too-familiar American nightmare of mass shootings. Let¶¶Òőap not kid ourselves, gun violence didn’t cease with the pandemic. In fact, it got worse. Over the course of the past year, gun violence and gun sales have skyrocketed. Last year was one of the deadliest years on record, with estimates suggesting that total gun deaths will exceed 40,000. The gun violence that has worsened over the past year doesn’t often make headlines: gun violence in cities, domestic gun violence, suicide, and unintentional gun violence in homes. But that doesn’t make them any less deadly or any less tragic.

This is the price of freedom in America — unfettered access to guns. Politicians who are so craven and beholden to the NRA that no matter how loud we’ve raised our voices, we’ve been forced into a silent despair — the recognition that nothing has changed. When will we learn, if we fail to act, the question is not if, but when. When will it be your town, your friend, your loved one?

In Colorado we’ve fought year after year for tougher gun safety laws — and we won. But that road wasn’t easy. The passage of basic, common-sense laws to save lives was met with vicious personal attacks and recalls of gun safety champions in the legislature. We became the target of a powerful gun lobby that cares only about selling more guns, with no regard for human life.

Here in Boulder we banned the sale and possession of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines after the Parkland shooting. But the NRA, bankrupt and losing in the court of public opinion, waged a hard-fought battle to turn back the tide, and that ban was blocked in court just ten days before tragedy struck our community. We’ll never know if it would have prevented the shooting and those ten precious souls would still be with us today, but Boulder would certainly be a safer city with that ban in place.

It¶¶Òőap been 25 years since our national leaders passed a federal gun safety law –– that¶¶Òőap 25 years of survivors mourning their loved ones, 25 years of tireless activism, 25 years of senseless shootings like Boulder, Atlanta, and countless others that do not make the headlines. We need more than thoughts and prayers to prevent gun violence and save lives — we need federal action now.

A bill to require background checks on all gun sales — a policy 93% of Americans support — has already passed the House and is awaiting a vote in the U.S. Senate. The Biden-Harris Administration can also take executive action to save lives from gun violence, like banning the importation of assault weapons, including some semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines. There is a mandate to act on gun safety, and we cannot rest until we’ve fundamentally transformed gun laws in America, no matter how long it takes.

Like the memorial candles burning outside of Umba, Lonna’s light will eternally shine bright. For those of us she touched, she made a mark we will carry forever in our hearts. As anyone who met her will tell you — Lonna’s authentic kindness, compassion, and generous spirit made this world a better place.

This weekend, I’ll put on my Umba pants and honor Lonna the way she’d want most  — loving deeply, shining brightly, and spreading kindness. Then I’ll honor her and the nine other lives in the way I know best — fighting for stronger gun laws with renewed resolve.

Stefanie Clarke is the founder of Shed Light: Storytelling for Social Impact. She was the deputy director of the Everytown Survivor Network.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

“In seconds, the lives of dozens of families, and the life of an American community, were changed forever,” Biden said in a statement released Sunday.

The president used the occasion to call on Congress to strengthen gun laws, including requiring background checks on all gun sales and banning assault weapons.

There was no time to wait, the president said. “We owe it to all those we’ve lost and to all those left behind to grieve to make a change. The time to act is now.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered flags be lowered to half staff from sunrise to sunset across the state to honor those who perished when a former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas opened fire on campus with an AR-15 rifle on Valentines Day in 2018.

When the gunfire ended, 14 students and three staff members were dead, and 17 others were wounded. The suspect, Nikolas Cruz, is still awaiting trial.

In his proclamation for a day of remembrance, DeSantis asked fellow Floridians to pause for a moment of silence at 3 p.m. Sunday.

“The Parkland community is resilient in the wake of tragedy, reminding us just how strong and united Floridians can be in the face of such devastating loss,” the governor said in his proclamation.

The Republican governor also noted some of the school safety measures enacted since the tragedy three years ago, including money to install panic alert systems at schools across the state and to strengthen programs meant to prevent violence before they occur.

The panic alert measure was dubbed “Alyssa’s Law,” in honor of 14-year-old Alyssa Alhadeff, one of the students killed three years ago.

Parkland parents have been divided over how lawmakers should respond.

Ryan Petty, whose daughter Alaina was 14 when she was killed in the shooting, addressed the president in a tweet Sunday.

“Mr. President, thank you for remembering the loved ones taken from us 3 years ago,” he wrote. “Alaina loved this country and the freedoms it guarantees. Common sense tells us that honoring her life does not require infringement on the rights of law-abiding citizens.”

In an interview Sunday, Petty said the president¶¶Òőap proposals won’t prevent more tragedies.

“It¶¶Òőap wrong to focus on the weapon,” said Petty, who is now a member of the state school board. “For those who understand what happened that day, there were mistakes. This was the most preventable school shooting in the history of our country. The warning signs were there. It was clear the killer had intentions to attack the school.”

Petty remembered his daughter as a friend to everyone, and recounted how important community service was to her.

“For those of us who lost loved ones that day, it¶¶Òőap pretty much like any other day. We miss them. There’s nothing we can do to bring them back. The only thing we can do is move forward and try to honor their memories and make sure this doesn’t happen to any other families,” he said.

But critics of the governor and Republican-controlled Legislature say guns are too easily accessible and say more needs to be done to keep assault-style guns away from potentially bad actors.

“The passage of time has done little to heal the heartbreak we felt upon hearing the shocking news three years ago today, nor dulled our sense of outrage at the lack of consequential legislative action from lawmakers since that horrible morning — laws that would prevent another Parkland from ever happening again,” said Manny Diaz, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party.

Over the years, deadly violence targeting schools has shaken the nation — including the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 that claimed 32 lives and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012. Even before the Parkland tragedy, there was already plenty of anguish in Florida over gun violence. Less than two years before, another gunman shot up the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people.

None of the deadly events produced comprehensive gun laws. Mass shootings have galvanized gun control advocates, who have been met with resistance from Republican lawmakers and their 2nd Amendment allies. It remains to be seen what will be done on the federal level, despite Democratic control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.

“This Administration will not wait for the next mass shooting to heed that call. We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer,” the president said his statement Sunday.

In addition to background checks and an assault-weapons ban, Biden is calling on Congress to outlaw high-capacity magazines and make gun manufacturers liable for the role their products play in violence.

“For three years now, the Parkland families have spent birthdays and holidays without their loved ones,” Biden said.

“Today, as we mourn with the Parkland community, we mourn for all who have lost loved ones to gun violence,” he said.

“Over these three years, the Parkland families have taught all of us something profound,” the president continued. “Time and again, they have showed us how we can turn our grief into purpose – to march, organize, and build a strong, inclusive, and durable movement for change.”