Cruz Control
I couldn’t make it to the school board meeting where Kenny presented his report, but my wife came home very upset. Almost nothing upsets Julie. She always wants to think the best of everyone, and it’s nearly impossible for her to say an unkind word. But the way the superintendent and the school board treated Kenny left her feeling disgusted. I knew that if Julie was upset, there must really be something wrong with these people.
At that meeting they also voted to not allow money from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act’s Coach Aaron Feis Guardian Program to fund armed guards for Broward schools. The reason why, they said, was that they didn’t want to arm teachers.
That was bullshit. The Guardian Program explicitly excluded teachers from participating. It was about allowing highly trained veterans or security staff to carry a gun to protect students. A new law was passed because of a failure on their watch, and then they used a politically correct talking point as an excuse to avoid complying with it.
Between that and the fact that Runcie was calling criticism of the PROMISE program “fake news,” I knew I had to take a hard look at everything. All Runcie had to do was tell the truth. If he had, maybe Kenny and Max wouldn’t have dug into it any further. But when Runcie started carefully crafting statements and crying, “fake news!” all of us knew he was hiding something. I made it my mission to figure out what, and together, Max, Kenny, Kim, Royer, and I started our own investigation.
I wanted to understand every single failure leading up to February 14, everything that went wrong, and every reason why it went wrong. And I wanted to expose it all so that America could learn from it. Once I started investigating, I realized that the biggest and most important failure was how the Broward County school district had handled Nikolas Cruz.
I hate using his name. Using a killer’s name can spur copycats, sick people who want to become famous too. Before the tragedy, the shooter recorded a video saying, “By the power of my AR you will know my name.” And the media made damn sure of that. That’s why I almost always call him by his prison number, 18–1958, instead.
But Part II of this book is titled “Cruz Control” because the only reason this kid became a mass murderer was that the whole system in Broward was even sicker than he was. We’ll take you step by step on his journey through the school system. We’ll show you the decisions that the adults made and explain why they made them. Every step of the way, they had a choice: do the responsible thing and help him, or do the politically correct thing and ignore him. They made the wrong choice every single time.
Some people have said that the Parkland tragedy was a “total system failure.” When you read Part II of this book, it will seem almost unbelievable. But when you take a deeper dive into the school district and its politically correct policies in Part III, every failure will make sense. In fact, in a fucked-up way, I’m not even sure you could call what happened a “failure” because everyone was doing exactly what these policies and this system encouraged them to do. Nikolas Cruz could not possibly have broadcast more clearly who and what he was.
That’s why I only blame Cruz 50 percent for what happened. And that’s why, in this part of the book, we use his name. Because his name should not be associated with the style of rifle he used, like he wants. Rather, “Cruz Control” should become a thought that haunts educators, an answer to the rhetorical question, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Because that’s how we stop this from ever happening again: by studying what happened and learning from it. If our school leaders focus less on professional convenience and more on the students in front of them, America’s schools will become safer at every level.
—Andy