A 19-year-old teen, Nikolas Cruz has confessed to killing 17 people and injuring several others at his former high school in Florida, court documents on Thursday showed.
The FBI admitted it had received a tip-off about the gunman yet failed to stop him.
This is the country’s worst school massacre since the Sandy Hook attack six years ago, President Donald Trump suggested the root cause of the violence was a crisis of mental health.
Cruz has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder, appearing Thursday afternoon via video link before a judge who ordered him held without bond. More than a dozen other people were injured in the shooting spree
Cruz, stalked the school with a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle killing students at sight.
After being read his legal rights, “Cruz stated that he was the gunman who entered the school campus armed with a AR-15 and began shooting students that he saw in the hallways and on the school grounds,” court documents showed.
Cruz arrived at the school in an Uber at 2:19 pm, authorities said. Less than three minutes later, he started spraying multiple classrooms with bullets. At 2:28 pm, he left the campus, according to an official timeline.
Cruz told police that he discarded his rifle — which he bought legally in Florida — and tactical gear in order to blend in with the crowd so he could flee, the documents showed.
