Justice Department to pay $130 million to families of victims, survivors of Parkland shooting

Family members of those killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, will be receiving $130 million from the U.S. Justice Department over the FBI’s failure to properly investigate the teenager who shot and killed 17 people there.

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According to the lawsuit filed by 40 survivors and relatives of those killed by Nikolas Cruz, the agency failed to investigate tips about Cruz that had been called into the FBI months before the shooting, The New York Times reported.

One woman called the FBI to tell them that Cruz was posting threatening messages on Instagram.

“I know he’s going to explode,” the woman said on the FBI’s tip line. The woman said she feared Cruz “was going to slip into a school and start shooting the place up.”

Two days after the Feb. 14, 2018 shooting, the FBI said the agency had received tips about Cruz but had not investigated them in accordance with its protocols.

Attorneys for the families and the department said in a joint court filing Monday, they’ve reached an agreement to settle all the claims at issue in the case.

“Although the financial details of the agreement are presently confidential, it is an historic settlement and the culmination of the Parkland families’ long and arduous efforts toward truth and accountability,” the law firm representing the families, Podhurst Orseck, said in a statement.

According to the suit, a tip about Cruz had come five months before the shooting, in September 2017, when a bail bondsman in Mississippi reported that a commentator with the user name “nikolas cruz” had left a disturbing message on his YouTube channel: “I’m going to be a professional school shooter,” it read.

Cruz pleaded guilty to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder last month. He is scheduled to go on trial early next year.

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