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On that afternoon, Cruz was dropped off by an Uber at the school, and walked into the school with a rifle bag and a backpack. Outside, a campus monitor, Andrew Medina, spotted Cruz, knew he was carrying a gun bag, and knew Cruz as ‘Crazy Boy’. Medina radioed to tell another monitor in the building, but he did not pursue Cruz himself. He later said ‘something inside told me not to approach him’. The second monitor, David Taylor, started to follow Cruz in the school, recognising him as ‘someone they had previously discussed as being a potential school shooter’, but then walked away from him (later claiming that he was going to intercept him). Hearing gunshots, Taylor hid in a janitor’s closet, and did not notify others or set off a ‘Code Red’ alarm. Other monitors – Andrew Feis and Chris Hixon – acted more courageously than Medina and Taylor, and charged Cruz, but it cost them their lives.

While these two campus monitors were unarmed, the school also had an armed policeman (known as a school resource officer) on the site, Deputy Scot Peterson. Once in the building, Cruz pulled a fire alarm, and, as students spilled into the hallways thinking it was a fire drill, he started shooting them indiscriminately. Hearing gunfire, Peterson radioed to say ‘possible shots fired’ in the building, but he did not enter. Instead, he took cover, and called for an intersection to be cordoned off and a school lockdown. Four more Broward County deputies arrived on the scene, and heard gunshots, but remained in their cars. It was later revealed that Cruz used a relatively small magazine (six shots), and paused often to reload; it’s possible that during those pauses he could have been stopped – if police were there.

Six minutes after he began his deadly assault, Cruz dropped his rifle, left the school and ran across campus. The police thought he was still inside. Peterson told other deputies over the radio to stay out of the school. Police from another force, Coral Springs, arrived, and a Broward cop told them: ‘Don’t go in.’ They rightly ignored this advice, but it was too late. It was not until five minutes after Cruz had left that the first officer went into the building.

Prior training instructed police to rush towards gunshots, but that did not happen in Parkland on that day. No command post was immediately established – again, in contravention of training. It was not clear who was in charge, just chaos. After scrambling around and discovering Cruz had escaped, the police finally apprehended Cruz in town, over an hour after he started his rampage…

School officials knew well that Cruz had serious problems and was potentially dangerous. He was held back twice, and was frequently transferred between schools. He vandalised the school, tossed furniture across classrooms, brought knives and bullets to school, and threatened to kill teachers. Eighteen months before his massacre, staff were so concerned about his violent tendencies and fascination with guns that they banned him from practicing shooting skills with the junior officer corps, and prohibited him from carrying a backpack – yet they still let him attend classes, until he was expelled in 2017…

In 2013, following Obama administration pressure to reduce racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions, the district adopted a new policy to limit police arrests at school. The Broward programme, called PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism though Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support and Education), meant that even felonies such as weapons possession and assault could be kept from the police. Cruz’s lack of criminal record meant he could pass a background check and legally purchase the AR-15 rifle he used to kill…