It was Valentine's Day across America.
At an all-American high school in a green and placid Broward County suburb strung with waterways and golf-course communities, that innocent fact would take on dreadful significance well before the day was out.
Between classes at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, near the sharp, straight line where suburban Parkland meets the Everglades, students exchanged chocolates, flowers and cards.
Early that morning, not far from the school's expansive campus, a troubled young man named Nikolas Cruz was awakened for school by his host, James Snead. Snead and his wife, whose son was one of Cruz's few friends, took in the young man after he lost his mother - his father had died previously - to a fatal illness in November. Unlike the Sneads' son, though, Cruz wasn't attending Stoneman
Douglas any longer. He had been expelled for bad behavior and was enrolled in an adult education school to get his GED.
This account of what happened during one of the nation's worst school gun massacres is pieced together from a police timeline that is based in part on security camera footage from inside and outside the school, and the descriptions and recollections of those who lived through that terrible afternoon
First he shot into one classroom, then the one across the hall and then the next one after that. He then doubled back to the first two rooms before shooting up a fourth.It was total terror and confusion in Building 12.
Survivors' accounts suggest that Cruz shot into the classrooms from the hallway, firing through doors and windows, rather than entering the rooms.
Rebecca Bogart, 17, was listening to the lecture about the Holocaust in a classroom on the first floor of Building 12 when she heard gunshots.
"We all took cover and hid," said Bogart, who said she squeezed under her teacher's desk. "We were just trying to stay calm. Everyone tried to stay quiet."
Moments later, gunshots hit and shattered a window separating the classroom from the hallway.
"So I knew it was real. This was happening," she said. "This is something you see on the news and never expect to happen."
Four kids in the class were injured, Bogart said.
Samantha Mahecha, 14, was in study hall in a classroom next to the entrance of the building when she, too, heard gunshots. Her classmates ran to one corner of the room to hide behind the teacher's desk.
The teacher was worried about a group of students she had allowed to leave the classroom before the shooting started, Mahecha said. Students were allowed to come and go during study hall to work on group projects. One student had been in the hallway working on a project when the shooting started. Two other boys had been on their way back to the classroom.
Mahecha heard glass shatter as a bullet broke an interior window nearby. Then she heard screaming in the hallway. The two boys tried to get inside the classroom, but they didn't make it in time. Later she would learn that three of the students who had left the class to work on projects were among the dead.
Cruz took the western stairwell up to the second floor and shot into a single classroom there, before climbing to the third floor, where witnesses say he continued his deadly spree.
The deadliness of Cruz's rampage may have been exacerbated by something that happened early on: Shortly after the shooting commenced, a fire alarm went off. It's unclear whether Cruz deliberately set off the alarm. Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie said later it was likely tripped by smoke from the firing of the assault rifle in the closed hallway.
The fire alarm put students and teachers directly in Cruz's path before it dawned on anyone what was really going on.
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