A report is now revealing that the Parkland shooter was asking for help in the time leading up to the massacre. It wasn’t like it was minutes before the shooting and someone made a mistake, but this was about a year in advance of the shooting, which is plenty of time to help someone who asks for it.

Unfortunately, the requests for help were fumbled or ignored and the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was left alone, living his life and not getting the mental health help that he needed – help that could have saved 17 people from losing their lives. The cowards of Broward police officers didn’t help much either as some of them stood outside while people inside the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were murdered in cold blood.

According to a story posted on the Sun-Sentinel, it appears that the shooter had asked for help and was even “stripped of the therapeutic services disabled students need, leaving him to navigate his schooling as a regular student despite mounds of evidence that he wasn’t.” A full report is shown on this link and refers to the shooter as NC.

He could have also been transferred to a school that focused on students with special needs, but he wasn’t, according to the Daily Wire.

Their story states that Cruz had even asked to be returned to what was known as the “special education campus” and he wasn’t granted that either. These are steps that could have taken place and possibly saved people from the shooting, potentially leading Cruz in a different or better direction that could have changed his mind about committing the massacre. The lethal combination of not getting help and then the cowardly police not protecting people like they should have is what likely caused the body count to be as high as it was.

The warning signs were there and he asked for help, but according to the report he was denied and now here we are, all this time later, and we’re learning about the horrible actions that lead up to the massacre.

“Those conclusions were revealed Friday in a consultant’s report commissioned by the Broward public school system. Broward Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer ordered that the report be released publicly, but with nearly two-thirds of the content blacked out.

The school district said the alterations were needed to comply with the shooter’s privacy rights, but the method the district used to conceal the text failed. The blacked-out text became visible when pasted into another computer file.

What emerged was the first detailed account of Cruz’s years in the school system, what the school district knew about him and what mistakes were made.

Without directly criticizing the schools, the consultant, the Collaborative Educational Network of Tallahassee, recommended that the district reconsider how cases like Cruz’s are handled. The recommendations suggest that Cruz could have been offered more help in his final two years in high school, leading up to the Feb. 14 shooting.

Whether that would have changed the outcome is impossible to know.”

It’s not a definite that Cruz wouldn’t have committed the shooting, but had he gotten help, then there’s a good chance he could’ve been heading in a better direction and had a supportive group or shoulder to lean on. Instead, he was left alone to roam without help and we see how horrible that turned out.

We won’t ever know for sure what would’ve happened if Cruz had mental health help, but someone who is receiving support and help is probably less likely to run back to school and murder someone. Sadly, we’re beyond the point of no return and can only work to help others in the same situations.

Where did this information come from? The Sun Sentinel posted a story providing such information, particular to Cruz’s case, and it’s horrible to know that there’s a slight chance this could’ve been prevented entirely.

The Sun-Sentinel reported:

“The consultant found that the district largely followed the laws, providing special education to the shooter starting when he was 3 years old and had already been kicked out of day care. But “two specific instances were identified,” the report says, where school officials did not follow the requirements of Florida statute or federal laws governing students with disabilities.

Those instances:

— School officials misstated Cruz’s options when he was faced with being removed from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School his junior year, leading him to refuse special education services.

— When Cruz asked to return to the therapeutic environment of Cross Creek School for special education students, the district “did not follow through,” the report reveals.

Nikolas Cruz: The warning signs ahead of Stoneman Douglas shooting
In part because of the errors, Cruz had no school counseling or other special education services in the 14 months leading up to the shooting on Feb. 14, the report says.

In an interview late Friday night, Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie said that district officials had wanted to release the full report but did not intentionally post it in a way that allowed the blacked-out portions to be read. “I didn’t even know that was possible,” he said.

Runcie said the redaction of parts of the report was to comply with judges’ orders and the defense’s objections to the report being made public: “It should not be insinuated or suggested at all that we wanted to redact or hide portions from the public.”

He said the purpose of the report was to explain to the public what happened, to fix any problems identified by the experts and to provide better training for staff in the future. The details accidentally revealed do not alter any of the conclusions, Runcie said.

“Nobody ever said this was an average child,” Runcie said of Cruz. “The district was the one — out of all the agencies — that was providing some level of service to the child.”

In the past, Runcie said that when Cruz turned 18 and rejected special education placement, the district could no longer provide him with the services given to students with emotional and behavioral disabilities. But the consultant’s report reveals for the first time that Cruz himself requested to return to special education, and his request went nowhere.

Three days after he was forced by the district to withdraw from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, he purchased an AR-15 rifle. A year after his ejection from Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a school he insisted he would graduate from, he returned and murdered 14 students and three coaches.

Some special education experts have told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that the district should have looked for other ways to help him in his final two years of school, before the shooting. The district treated him like a general education student for his final two years. Cruz left Stoneman Douglas two or three months after giving up his special education services.from one class to another.”

The signs were there. The help was likely available. And here we are with 17 people buried and nothing but questions.

It looks like we finally have some answers and that all points to being more aggressive when it comes to people with mental health issues needing help.

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