SweetSue92
Diamond Member
The thing about Cruz though is that if I remember correctly, they said that his home addresses where he lived had 39 contacts with law enforcement, that he was given the nickname "School Shooter" by his fellow students, and that the school resource officer (Scot Peterson) who they tried to prosecute for not having gone in during the shooting at least tried to have Cruz involuntarily committed.
Because they didn't want to "disadvantage" him with a negative juvenile record showing a commitment they instead erred in the other direction and 17 students lost their lives at the hands of Cruz. And the state of Florida could not see their way clear to put him to death.
Why is his one life more important to the state of Florida than the seventeen lives of those he killed?
I'm not in the criminal justice system; that's out of my wheelhouse, so I don't spend much time or attention with what happens with criminals after they're incarcerated. Not because it's not important, more because that's not my focus. To me, as long as he can never ever hurt a bunch of people again, that's all the energy I have to devote to it.
My energy is in getting my fellow educators to stop minimizing the danger of these future criminals and psychopaths. As I have posted before, we regularly have assaults in school that, in any other venue, would result in criminal charges. But we consider it "part of the job". It's all part of the mindset that the child with needs deserves MORE attention and MORE consideration than the others. And THAT is criminal, in my opinion.
You would think that with school shooters prominent, my system would focus on how to identify future shooters, but no. We focus just on 1. What to do when it happens and 2. The weapon. I would say this is unbelievably stupid but I'm in education. I have seen 30 years of the unbelievably stupid.