Roosevelt grad Robert Runcie leads Florida district after shooting

A Franklin D. Roosevelt High School graduate is leading the Florida school district attempting to recover from the nation’s deadliest school shooting in more than five years.

Robert Runcie, the Broward County Public Schools superintendent and a 1980 Roosevelt graduate, called on government at the state and federal level to address the issues of gun control and mental health funding on Thursday.

Nikolas Cruz, an orphaned 19-year-old with a troubled past and his own AR-15 rifle was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder Thursday, according to law enforcement officials.

Cruz, expelled from Broward's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida last year for fighting, returned to the school Wednesday, bolstered by a gas mask, smoke grenades and multiple magazines of ammunition and a semi-automatic weapon he had legally purchased, according to police.

Runcie on Thursday said “now is the time to have a real conversation about gun control legislation,” and said that if adults can’t manage that in their lifetimes, he said students will do it.

Several of Cruz's former classmates Thursday said they believed the 19-year-old had violent tendencies. 

Thirteen wounded survivors were hospitalized, including two people in critical condition. The Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said some bodies remained inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as authorities investigate the crime scene. The slain included a school athletic director and another adult who worked as a monitor at the school. Runcie called them heroes.

Cruz was ordered held without bond and booked into jail, still wearing a hospital gown after he also was treated, for labored breathing. The jail said he is 5-foot-7 and weighs 131 pounds.

His former classmates thought they were having another drill when a fire alarm sounded, requiring them to leave their classrooms Wednesday.

That’s when police say Cruz opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon, killing 17 people and sending hundreds of students fleeing into the streets.

It was the nation’s deadliest school shooting since a gunman attacked an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years ago. The overall death toll differs by how such shootings are defined, but Everytown For Gun Safety has tallied 291 school shootings in America since 2013, and this attack makes 18 so far this year.

Runcie was appointed superintendent in 2011. According to his biography on the Broward County Public Schools, he was born in Jamaica before moving to the United States. He grew up in the mid-Hudson Valley and attended Roosevelt, where he starred on the basketball team before attending Harvard. His brother, James Runcie, a 1981 Roosevelt graduate, was the Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Department of Education Federal Student Aid before resigning last May.

Cruz legally purchased the AR-15 used in the attack about a year ago, law enforcement officials told the Associated Press. The officials, not authorized to discuss this publicly, spoke on condition of anonymity. Federal law allows people 18 and older to legally purchase long guns, including this kind of assault weapon.

Months before the incident, the troubled teen began showing what may have been missed warning signs he was bent on violence. Students and neighbors reported that Cruz threatened and harassed others, talked about killing animals, posed with guns in disturbing photos on social media, and bragged about target practice in his backyard with a pellet gun.

In fact, students weren’t surprised when Cruz was identified as the gunman in Wednesday’s rampage, said 17-year-old Dakota Mutchler.

“I think everyone had in their minds if anybody was going to do it, it was going to be him,” Mutchler said.

Student Victoria Olvera, 17, said that Cruz had been abusive to his ex-girlfriend and that his expulsion was over a fight with her new boyfriend. Cruz had been attending another school in Broward County since the expulsion, school officials said.

But Runcie said he did not know of any threats against the school from Cruz.

“Typically you see in these situations that there potentially could have been signs out there,” Runcie said. “I would be speculating at this point if there were, but we didn’t have any warnings. There weren’t any phone calls or threats that we know of that were made.”

As reactions poured in Thursday, President Donald Trump focused on the young man’s mental health, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he wants the Justice Department to study how mental illness and gun violence intersect, to better understand how law enforcement can use existing laws to intervene before school shootings begin.

“It cannot be denied that something dangerous and unhealthy is happening in our country,” Sessions told a group of sheriffs in Washington. In “every one of these cases, we’ve had advance indications and perhaps we haven’t been effective enough in intervening.”

Israel called for giving law enforcement more power to detain people who make threats.

“What I’m asking our lawmakers to do is go back to places like Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., to give police the power,” the sheriff said, to detain people who make graphic threats or post disturbing material online, and bring them involuntarily to mental health professionals to be examined.

The sheriff said law enforcement can certainly visit gun owners whose mental health is questioned, “whether they have a gun legally or not.”

The Associated Press and USA TODAY Network contributed to this report.