Students and teachers who survived the Florida high school shooting on February 14 told investigators how they watched classmates die, had bullets whiz past them and huddled in fear until they were rescued by police, in some of the most dramatic records released so far from the mass shooting.
They talked of walking over dead bodies as police evacuated them from the building, and confusion as some saw the 19-year-old suspect Nikolas Cruz among evacuating students, knowing he had been kicked out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School a year earlier, and recalling troubling and racist encounters they’d had with him before the shooting.
Prosecutors released the statements on Friday from the investigation into the shooting in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman killed 17 people.
The redacted statements are the latest evidence released under Florida law that makes documents public record once turned over to defense attorneys in a criminal trial.
Some student names in the released report are redacted and others are not, but none of the students are named here as they are juveniles. These are some of their stories.
Witness statements from students and teachers who survived the shooting massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14 have now been made public, pursuant to Florida law; Students are seen here after being released from a lockdown outside of the high school in Parkland, Florida, after the shooting
The shooter, using an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, started firing in a first-floor hallway of the Stoneman Douglas freshman building near where a ninth-grade girl was sitting in class writing an essay on her laptop.
The member of the school’s Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps heard two loud bangs but thought they were Valentine’s Day balloons popping. She and her teacher exchanged a reassuring look but about 10 seconds later a bullet game through the door and shattered her computer screen. Another bullet grazed her arm and another went through her shirt.
‘That’s when everyone starting freaking out and the teacher started screaming, saying to take cover,’ the girl said. She said everyone tried to hide behind the teacher’s desk but there wasn’t enough room.
She said she ran back to her desk, grabbed her phone and called 911. She said she watched a girl who was standing get hit in the chest and slide down the wall. A boy who got shot in the chest clung to a desk, hyperventilating, but soon went limp, she said.
Another boy was shot in the head, but he never lost consciousness because the girl used part of her JROTC shirt to apply pressure to his wound.
Police soon arrived in the room and she and her classmates were escorted out, leaving behind the boy, the girl and another girl who had died.
She said she saw five or six more bodies in the hall.
Thousands of mourners hold candles during a candlelight vigil held on February 15 for victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida
Worried loved ones waiting for word from students at Coral Springs Drive and the Sawgrass Expressway just south of the campus of Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida after the shooting that took the lives of 17 people on February 14
In another part of the building, an algebra teacher said she was walking on the second floor toward a sneezing student when she recognized the sound of gunshots in the hall and immediately called a ‘Code Red’ – an active shooter alert – in her class.
She said had placed tape on her classroom’s floor marking off the section that couldn’t be seen from the window in the door and the students knew to huddle together in that area.
She heard more and more gunshots and gathered her students close to her, playing with girls’ hair and telling the students she could hear help coming to try to calm them.
The fire alarm then went off, but the teacher said she had no intention of evacuating her room. She said she thought that decision may have saved her students because she thought she saw the shooter go past the window.
Many who died were on the third floor and were in the hallway evacuating when the gunman came up the stairwell and mowed them down.
She said one ‘very strong young man’ placed himself against the wall and was going to be the class’s ‘hero,’ charging the gunman if he got into the room. But when the door finally opened, it was by police officers who led her and her students out.
Outside of the building, one student who said she knew Cruz was standing on the athletic field after being evacuated when she said saw him in the crowd.
She said that struck her as strange because he had been kicked out of Stoneman Douglas a year earlier.
‘I didn’t know what he was doing there,’ she said.
Florida school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz, 19, glances up at the prosecutors while in court before Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer for a hearing to move forward with the death penalty case on April 27 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Another student said he spoke briefly to Cruz at the nearby Walmart where evacuated students were taken.
‘I said, like, “I thought you got expelled last year.” And he’s like, “No, the school took me back in,”‘ the student said, adding that he believed him.
‘He was pretty scared. He was like all terrified,’ he added. Later, he lost sight of Cruz and didn’t see him again.
The boy said also said he had known Cruz during his sophomore year, and that Cruz often would talk about violence and bring knives and bullets to school. He also brought dead animals in bags.
‘He used to show everyone, “Oh, look I’m so proud of the killing,”‘ the boy said, of Cruz.
He also said Cruz made racist remarks about Jewish and black people, and drew Nazi symbols. He said Cruz agreed with Hitler that ‘all Jews were dead and stuff.’
Cruz’s attorneys have said he would plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence without parole. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.