There were many opportunities to raise red flags and act upon them regarding the shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, but it never happened. Those opportunities were not just over the course of days, weeks, or months -- all of which can be ample time -- it was over the course of roughly eight years. It even included law enforcement authorities receiving more than twenty phone calls about the shooter, and going to the shooter's residence nearly forty times since 2010. Even the shooter's first host family -- he was an orphan as of last Fall -- warned law enforcement officials about the shooter.
Some of the students at the high school are praising the FBI, saying they were among the first responders. That is true. However, it is also true that the FBI failed to act in time to stop this from happening. Local law enforcement did not do enough. School staff did not do enough. While all of those entities are doing the right things now, as they should, they all let their guard down.
Sometimes, there is no guard (read as "legal authority") to be held up, as in states and/or municipalities not having laws or statutes in place to deal with these serious situations. In Florida, however, there is something on the books called the Baker Act (or Florida Mental Health Act of 1971). What the Baker Act allows for is a person who is deemed mentally unstable (as the Act defines it) and is deemed a danger to self or others (also as defined in the Act) to be involuntarily committed for evaluation.
The Baker Act is on the books. The Baker Act was not invoked. Our guard was let down. The massacre took place.
The shooter also commented on a YouTube video last Fall, writing, "Im [sic] going to be a professional school shooter." The poster of the video alerted YouTube, which removed the comment, and his local FBI office. The FBI did nothing until after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Then, they contacted the video's poster, telling him they thought the person who posted the comment months earlier might have been the shooter because the name of the person who posted the comment matched the name of the shooter. (The video commenter's YouTube ID was the shooter's name, spelled exactly as it should be, without any creative spelling.)
In response to the YouTube comment and subsequent investigation, FBI Special Agent In Charge Rob Lasky stated, "No additional information was found to positively identify the person who posted this comment. There was no connection found to South Florida." Perhaps, even after all of the problems with, and reports about, the shooter over the better part of a decade, his name was never put into any database to be found.
Relevant law enforcement databases exist. The shooter's name might never have been entered into any of them. Our guard was let down. The massacre took place.
Now, it has been reported that a sheriff's deputy assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School waited outside the school building where the shooter was for four minutes before entering. (The shooting lasted six minutes.) Protocol states that any first-to-arrive law enforcement official must engage an active shooter, whether to distract, to injure, or to kill.
The deputy was required to engage the shooter immediately. He did not. Our guard was let down. The massacre took place.
Two other plots for mass school shootings around the time of the Stoneman Douglas shooting were stopped from coming to fruition. The day before the Valentine's Day carnage in Parkland, a grandmother called 911 and showed the responding officers her grandson's writings about committing a mass murder. He possessed a rifle and grenades (all legally) and wrote how he could hardly wait to get "the biggest fatality number" he could. In Vermont, State Police conducted a two-day investigation into an eighteen-year-old individual that resulted in his arrest one week ago today for wanting to commit a school mass shooting.
In the above two examples, people took notice, raised red flags, local authorities acted, and massacres did not occur. They show that, when everything functions as it should, lives are saved.
However, too many lives are being lost because we far too often are letting our guard down.
Terry
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