along with the sense of mourning is the growing sense of outrage that balls were dropped, red flags were missed. first on his social media profile, the suspected shooter had extremely disturbing posts over a period of years including snapchat images of him cutting himself on the arms and saying he wanted to buy a gun. add this to the fbi call to the tip line, january 5th, a caller close to cruz said this man, cruz, is disturbed. he s unstable. he has a gun. he wants to kill people. i m worried he s going to shoot up a school. that is of course exactly what happened just six weeks later. the suspected shooter, 19 years old, made his first court appearance. the public defender said he is likely to plead guilty, this in order to avoid the death penalty. finally, the building behind me, that three-story building where most of the shootings took place, where it housed ninth graders as of wednesday, florida
for when he said yes, ma am. he barely raised his eyes. he is being represented by the public defender s office, and in that, we did learn some details about this shooter. that he is someone that his public defender described as having a lifelong history with mental illness, that this was a kid who didn t have a lot of breaks. and a kid who struggled through school. a kid who fell through every single crack. here is what his public defender said. he s a broken human being. he s a broken child. and when your brain is not fully developed, you don t know how to deal with these things. when you have the lack of impulse control that a 19year-old has, that affects the behavior that you exhibit. that s the child that i m sitting across from. reporter: the public
possession we stop asking why. you stop asking why and you stop asking, you know, was it parenting? i m not saying these parents. what happened in his childhood. maybe he had some moment health issue that wasn t taken care of. that blanket term evil to me absolves everyone of responsibility and say, oh, my gosh, this person was so evil. it may have been an evil act, but it doesn t necessarily mean the person is evil. i m not saying it s good what this person did, but we need to look behind that whole evil thing and figure out exactly look at the psychology of this person. again, the most important question we can ask is, could this have been prevented? you asked me that question. i can tell you from my experience working on over 50 death penalty cases many of them involving shootings like this. that there was plenty of warning signs can i play this before we run out of time? let me play the public defender so he can respond to that. play that, please. he s a broken huma
defender s office also cited what they say was the extreme trauma the shooter, his mother died in november of last year. he was essentially alone. tonight he is on a suicide watch, don. the public defender s office says he is expressing sadness about what happened. he does seem to be aware of what has occurred. kyung, a lot of people are wondering tonight how an individual like this, who was posting so many alarming things on social media, could go unnoticed, but the fbi had been warned. reporter: yes. you re talking about an fbi tip from february of 2017. and this came from a youtube vlogger out of mississippi. the mississippi vlogger was just simply putting up a video and then got an unusual comment, an unusual comment from someone who had the exact same name, nikolas cruz. unfortunately the name wasn t exactly spelled the way that this shooter s name was spelled.
away because he s dangerous, but for him, it s that more scary, i worked with him and i couldn t have done anything else, but, hey, you want to play basketball, that s just scary to think it could have happened at work or anywhere. reporter: the public defender says that as far as what the suspect is feeling right now, that he is expressing some sadness over what has happened, that he understands that there has been some loss of life, and that he is dealing with the shock. jake? thank you. my panel of law enforcement experts joins me to dig into this. josh campbell formally from the fbi. the fbi was told in september about the youtube post where the person said, i m going to be a professional school shooter. the person whose youtube page was reported to fbi, they sat down with him, took an interview, and we heard today from the fbi, they ran the guy s name on data base and couldn t find anything. be honest. he posted that under his own