FBI Tip-Line Caller Said Nikolas Cruz ‘Is Going to Explode’

A person close to accused Florida shooter said she wanted ‘clear conscience’ if he ‘just starts shooting’

Del Quentin Wilber

Feb. 23, 2018 2:50 p.m. ET

A person close to the teenager accused of killing 17 people at a Florida high school warned the FBI she was concerned he would “get into a school and just shoot the place up,” according to a transcript of her call with a bureau tip line operator more than a month before the massacre.

The transcript, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, provides chilling detail about the woman’s efforts on Jan. 5 to warn authorities about Nikolas Cruz’s propensity for violence and his troubled past. The caller’s identification was redacted from the transcript, but the tip-line operator called her “ma’am.” (Read the transcript; redactions by FBI.)


“You know, it’s just so much,” she said on the call. “I know he’s—he’s going to explode.” She said she was making the call because she wanted a “clear conscience if he takes off and, and just starts shooting places up.”

The FBI last week acknowledged receiving such a call, which it said was from a person close to Mr. Cruz. But the transcript and the stark nature of the caller’s precise warnings about Mr. Cruz’s disturbing actions and volatile temperament, previously hasn’t been made public.

The caller began by saying Mr. Cruz had the mental capacity of a 12- or 14-year-old. She said he had started posting messages on his Instagram account that he wanted to kill himself and she’d alerted police to that threat, but wasn’t sure what happened in that investigation.

More recently, Mr. Cruz “switched it to he wants to kill people,” the unidentified woman told the operator in a somewhat rambling conversation.

“Something is gonna happen,” she said. “Because he’s, he doesn’t have the mental capacity. He can’t, he’s so outraged if someone talks to him about certain things.”

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The woman provided a number of specifics about Mr. Cruz, identifying him by name, saying he lived in Parkland, Fla., naming his workplace and giving the address and number of the family with whom he was staying.

The caller described disturbing behavior by Mr. Cruz, including a propensity for cutting up frogs and, at least on one occasion, a bird.

“He brought the bird into the house,” she recounted. “He threw it on his mother’s kitchen counter and he started cutting it up. He has all kinds of hunting knives. I don’t know what knife he used, though. And he started cutting the bird up, and his mother…said, ‘What’re you doing?’ And he says, ‘I want to see what’s inside.’”

Then the caller said, “That to me would be a red flag.”

She said that at some point Mr. Cruz was due to receive $25,000 a year, apparently from a life insurance policy, and she was concerned he would spend it on guns. He had already used his mother’s Social Security money, the caller said, to purchase “all these rifles and ammunition” and had “posted pictures of them on Instagram.”

The allegations laid out in the call couldn’t be independently confirmed.

The caller provided detailed information about several of Mr. Cruz’s social-media accounts and encouraged the FBI to examine them, carefully spelling out each username. On those accounts, she said, the FBI would likely find photographs of Mr. Cruz dressed up as a ninja and a fighter for Islamic State.





“It’s alarming to see these pictures and to know what he’s capable of doing and what could happen,” the caller added. “He’s [been] thrown out of all these schools because he would pick up a chair and just throw it at somebody, a teacher or a student, because he didn’t like the way they were talking to him.”

The FBI last week issued a statement disclosing that the call wasn’t passed on to its Miami field office for investigation.

“Under established protocols, the information provided by the caller should have been assessed as a potential threat to life,” the FBI said. “The information then should have been forwarded to the FBI Miami field office, where appropriate investigative steps would have been taken.”

The FBI and the Justice Department are investigating why the lead wasn’t followed up.

It was one of a stream of mishaps in which law enforcement appears to not have followed up on warnings about Mr. Cruz.

Write to Del Quentin Wilber at [email protected]

[Post edited by Wahoo Ron at 02/23/2018 6:45PM]