Nikolas Cruz Trained With White Supremacists, Wore Pro-Trump Hat in School
Hate group says the accused Florida school shooter did paramilitary exercises and got a rifle from members. Ex-students say he wore a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat in school.
Samantha Allen
Kelly Weill
Taylor Lorenz
02.15.18 12:40 PM ET
Nikolas Cruz, the man accused of killing 17 people in a Florida high school, was a member of a “white separatist paramilitary proto-fascist organization,” the group told The Daily Beast.
Cruz, 19, is accused of opening fire inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Prior to the shooting, he trained with the Republic of Florida, the group’s captain Jordan Jereb said (as first reported by the Anti-Defamation League). The RoF seeks to create a “white ethnostate” in Florida, according to its website, a view that Cruz supposedly shared.
“I don’t know precisely what he believes,” Jereb said. “I know he knew full well he was joining a white separatist paramilitary proto-fascist organization.”
Cruz “seemed like just a normal, disenfranchised, young white man,” Jereb said.
While no motive has been described by police, Jereb speculated that Cruz may have allegedly committed the massacre out of hatred for Jews or women.
“There’s a very real sense of feminism being a cancer. That could’ve played into what he did, but we have female members of RoF,” Jereb said, adding that “we’re not a big fan of Jews. I think there were a lot of Jews at the school that might have been messing with him.”
Jereb said Cruz belonged to a RoF “cell” from Clearwater and drove up with members to Tallahassee to do paramilitary training. RoF was recently operating in Tallahassee and attempting to court new members, according to a local news report from last year. The group posts videos of training montages on the internet with members in fatigues brandishing weapons.
“I’m not trying to glorify it, but he was pretty efficient in what he did,” Jereb said. “He probably used that training to do what he did yesterday. Nobody I know told him to do that, he just freaked out.”
Cruz received at least one of his guns through the white supremacist group, according to Jereb.
“I think somebody bought him a Mosin–Nagant, but that’s bolt action. He had a semi-automatic in the school,” Jereb said.
Hate in High School
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Six classmates of Cruz told The Daily Beast he expressed extreme political views and disturbing behavior when he attended the high school he is now accused of attacking with a high-powered rifle.
“The one person I would expect to do it did it,” said Julianna Sivon, an 18-year-old graduate who said she sat next to Cruz in English class last year, adding, “He loved talking about his guns. He just didn’t seem right but he didn’t seem like he would do something this big.”
Kamrie Bazal, 19, says she also sat next to Cruz and was at the pool in a nearby park when a friend at the high school called and asked her to come get them.
“Someone should have stopped him,” Bazal said. “Especially on social media. The guns that were posted—it’s scary.”
Damar Osouna, 19, went to an alternative school with Cruz last year. When the shooting began, he started receiving frantic texts and Snapchat messages from friends at Douglas. When Osouna got to the school, he says, gunshots were still in the air.
“He always seemed off, he always talked about guns and stuff like that, but I would never take it serious like that,” Osouna told The Daily Beast. In hindsight, he says, it seems apparent that Cruz was a threat.
Two classmates said Cruz wore a “Make America Great Again” hat.
“I saw him wear a Trump hat,” said Sebastian Gonzalez, a 19-year-old who graduated from the high school in 2017. "At our school you were sort of with Trump or really against Trump.”
Ocean Parodie, a 17-year-old junior said that he also saw Cruz wearing the hat.
“He always wore like really patriotic shirts that seemed really extreme, like hating on the Islamic religion. For example, he would say things such as like, he would degrade Islamic people as terrorists and bombers. I've seen him wear a Trump hat,” Parodie said.
Nyla Hussain, a 16-year-old junior said her good friend sat next to Cruz in biology class last year and that he would regularly show her photos of dead animals.
“Whoever he sat next to in class he would show pics of animals that he hunted,” she said.
A Violent Life Online
Cruz wore the Trump hat in a photo on an Instagram account the company said belonged to him. Over his face he wore a red, white, and blue bandana. On that account and another one, Cruz posted photos of guns, knives, anti-Muslim slurs, and a picture of a toad he killed.
On YouTube, a person by the same name spewed hateful commentary about anti-fascists.
Cruz also celebrated Elliot Rodger, the gunman who killed seven people at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014, and who is considered a hero of the fringe men's rights movement.
“Elliot rodger will not be forgotten,” he commented on one video one year ago. Cruz also commented on a CNN video called, “Is our culture to blame for Elliot Rodger’s rants?”
The FBI said on Thursday it received a warning from a YouTube user about a “nikolas cruz” who wrote, “I’m going to be a professional school shooter” in a comment. FBI field agents interviewed the tipsters, but the bureau’s special agent in charge in Parkland said the FBI was unable to identify the user.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, more than 100 people have been killed or injured by perpetrators influenced by the alt-right since 2014. Last year, an alleged school shooter in New Mexico also expressed alt-right ideology online, as The Daily Beast previously reported.
—Gideon Resnick contributed to this report