A gunman opened fire at a South Florida high school at the end of the school day Wednesday, leaving 17 people dead and more than a dozen injured in one of the deadliest U.S. school shootings.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said at a news conference that the suspect, who is in custody, is 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, a former student who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons. The sheriff said that the suspect had “countless” gun magazines and one “AR-type rifle.” The suspect was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder Thursday morning after being questioned for hours by state and federal authorities.
The victims include both students and teachers, the sheriff said. Twelve people were killed inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., three outside the school and two people died at the hospital.
The school, which has an enrollment of 3,200 students, is in an affluent suburb northwest of Fort Lauderdale.
Security expert Joel Leffler was on a business trip in Dallas when he reached his 14-year-old daughter on the phone. “She was whispering, hiding,” he said. “She’s 14 years old and she had to see multiple dead bodies.…It’s something that you hear about all the time, and you never think it will happen to you.”
By Wednesday evening authorities had identified 12 of those killed, including a high school football coach, Mr. Israel said. The work was hampered by the way students scattered in the chaos.
“Some of these children had no ID,” the sheriff said. “They left their backpacks.”
The Florida school shooting is the deadliest since the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six adults were killed. It is the third-deadliest school shooting in modern U.S. history, after Sandy Hook and the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech.
Wednesday’s incident is the sixth high-school shooting so far this year that resulted in injury or death, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control and against gun violence. There have been about 30 school days in 2018.
Researchers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Texas State University tracked 44 active-shooter incidents at schools from 2000 through 2015. They looked for incidents where individuals were “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined or other populated area.” A total of 268 people were shot and 132 killed in those 44 school shootings, according to the study.
President Donald Trump tweeted “prayers and condolences to the families of the victims of the terrible Florida shooting.” The president said he spoke to Gov. Rick Scott and said “we are working closely with law enforcement.” Mr. Scott’s office said the governor went to Broward County to be briefed by emergency-management officials and law enforcement.
On Thursday morning Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter: “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!”
Broward County Public Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie said he was unaware of any sign that an attack was coming. “We didn’t have any warnings, there weren’t any phone calls or threats that we know of that were made,” he said.
Just before 3 p.m., at the end of the school day, the Broward County sheriff’s office said it responded to reports of a shooting at the school. A fire alarm sounded before dismissal time.
Nina Berkowitz, a senior at the school, said she and other students walked out of the school for what seemed like a fire drill. Then she said a teacher started shouting, “Code red! Code red! Everyone back in the building!”
“We thought it was a drill, but we all sprinted back into the building,” she said.
Ms. Berkowitz said she took shelter with a large group of people in a windowless television-production room, and stayed there for about 90 minutes. Then she and the others were ushered to an English classroom, where about 160 other students and six staff members waited to be evacuated.
Joshua Ruiz, 17, heard about 10 shots from his classroom and left the building to go to the school’s track, where he said there was a teen who had been shot in the knee. That was when Mr. Ruiz said he realized it wasn’t a drill and called his mom.
His mother Diana Ruiz said: “I was telling him, ‘run, run, run.’ ”
Stacey Udine said she was in constant cellphone contact with her 16-year-old niece as her niece holed up with other students inside the school. Her 17-year-old daughter, a senior, wasn’t there at the time.
Ms. Udine, a past president of the school’s parent-teacher association, said she knows one female student who was shot in the leg. “She’s OK,” Ms. Udine said. “The mother was more frantic than the student.”
As word of the shooting spread, Ms. Udine took call after call from parents desperate for information about their children, she said, adding, “Everybody was frantic. No one knew what was going on.”
“You don’t think it can happen, but it can happen anywhere,” she said. “No one’s safe anywhere.”
Write to Jon Kamp at jon.kamp@wsj.com and Scott Calvert at scott.calvert@wsj.com
