Seven Minutes at Parkland

It was Valentine’s Day, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Students had brought balloons and flowers. Some were dressed in red. The school day was nearly over.

Within minutes, a former student would kill fourteen students and three staff members and wound seventeen others. His name was Nikolas Cruz.

This is an account of what led to those minutes, what investigators said happened inside the school, and how Cruz was caught. Some of the details are disturbing. We’ll follow the sequence without dwelling on graphic injuries—and without losing sight of the people whose ordinary school day was taken from them.

Parkland was a community outside Fort Lauderdale with relatively little crime. Stoneman Douglas had about 3,200 students. Cruz had once been one of them.

According to an Associated Press account of the case, Cruz had received treatment for emotional problems since preschool and moved between conventional schools and schools for students with behavioral difficulties. At Stoneman Douglas, his conduct remained a concern. At one point, he was barred from carrying a backpack as a precaution against bringing in a weapon. He was also allowed to take part in the school’s rifle team. After further incidents, including at least one fight, he was expelled roughly a year before the shooting.

That history matters because it shows how many people had encountered pieces of his behavior. It does not mean every childhood difficulty foretells violence. Most people who struggle at school never commit a crime. The question in this case is what happened as Cruz’s threats became more specific.

After his expulsion, Cruz posted images of himself with guns and made videos threatening violence, including violence at the school. Around that period, he bought the semiautomatic rifle he would use in the attack.

His mother died of pneumonia in November 2017. Cruz then stayed with friends, taking his guns with him. In January 2018, someone worried that he might kill people called the FBI. As the Associated Press reported in 2021, that information was not forwarded to the bureau’s South Florida office; Cruz was not investigated or contacted as a result. Another acquaintance gave a similar warning to the Broward Sheriff’s Office. A deputy directed that caller toward the sheriff’s office in the county where Cruz was then staying.

In the weeks before February 14, Cruz recorded videos describing himself as a future school shooter. These warnings did not produce an intervention that stopped him. But hindsight must be handled carefully: it lets us assemble a sequence that no single person necessarily saw in full at the time.

Now the clock begins.

A timeline released by the Broward County sheriff put Cruz in an Uber at 2:06 p.m. on February 14. At 2:19, the driver dropped him at Stoneman Douglas. It was just before dismissal, when students were thinking about going home.

Cruz had brought his rifle in a case. The Associated Press reported that he assembled it in a bathroom. At about 2:21, according to the sheriff’s timeline, he entered the east stairwell of Building 12 and began firing into first-floor classrooms.

The rifle smoke set off the fire alarm. For people inside, that added another signal to interpret amid the sound of gunfire. The attack was moving quickly: from the Uber drop-off to the first shots, the sheriff’s timeline allows only about two minutes.

The sheriff’s account traces Cruz from those first-floor rooms up the west stairwell to the second floor, where he shot another victim. He then went toward the third floor. By 2:28 p.m., the timeline says, he had discarded his rifle and backpack and was running back down the stairs.

At his later sentencing trial, the prosecutor described seven minutes inside the three-story classroom building and said Cruz had fired 140 shots. Those numbers convey the speed and scale, but they cannot convey what it was like for the students and staff trapped there.

Outside, Scot Peterson, the school’s resource officer, heard shots but did not enter the building. He later said he had not known where the shots were coming from; investigators disputed that account, pointing to his radio transmissions. Meanwhile, officers responding to the campus faced a scene in which the attacker was no longer carrying his rifle. Cruz left Building 12 and moved across the grounds among students fleeing the school.

For a time, Cruz was away from the building and still at large. The sheriff’s timeline placed him at a nearby Walmart at 2:50 p.m., where he bought a drink at a Subway restaurant. At 3:01, he reached a McDonald’s and sat there briefly before leaving on foot.

At 3:41 p.m., an officer from the Coconut Creek Police Department detained him in a Coral Springs neighborhood. He was taken into custody without incident. Later that night, Cruz confessed to detectives.

There was no prolonged hunt for an unidentified gunman. He had escaped the immediate scene by blending into the crowd, but police found him walking nearby that afternoon. The questions left for investigators and families were how he had been able to carry out the attack—and what accountability would follow.

A state investigation subsequently identified security lapses at Stoneman Douglas and at schools across Florida. The shooting led to a state requirement for an armed guard at every public school during class hours. That was one response to the failures examined after the attack; it could not undo them.

The criminal case took years. Cruz pleaded guilty to murdering the seventeen people who died and to attempted murder in the attacks on seventeen others. The remaining fight in court was over his punishment. Prosecutors sought a death sentence. His defense did not dispute the horror of what he had done, but presented arguments about his development and mental health. Prosecutors challenged those explanations.

In October 2022, the jury did not unanimously recommend death, as Florida law then required for that sentence. On November 2, a judge sentenced Cruz to life in prison without parole. Parents of victims spoke in court with framed photographs of their loved ones; some condemned the jury’s decision not to impose death.

Among those killed was fourteen-year-old Gina Montalto. Her father, Tony, was one of the family members who spoke publicly as the case moved through court. Remembering her name matters more than remembering another detail about the attacker’s route.

The central sequence is clear: there were threats before the shooting; Cruz returned to his former school; in a matter of minutes, he killed seventeen people; he fled and was arrested that afternoon. He confessed, pleaded guilty and received a sentence of life without parole.

A conviction answered who committed the crime. It did not give back a Valentine’s Day, a classroom, or the years the victims’ families expected to share with the people they lost.