Jaime Guttenberg

The shooting came at a period of heightened public support for gun control that followed mass shootings in Paradise, Nevada, and in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in October and November 2017.

Students at Parkland founded Never Again MSD, an advocacy group that lobbies for gun control.

On March 9, Governor Rick Scott signed a bill that implemented new restrictions to Florida's gun laws and also allowed for the arming of teachers who were properly trained and the hiring of more school resource officers.

The Broward County Sheriff's Office received widespread criticism for its handling of the police response, both for not following up on multiple warnings about Cruz despite a lengthy record of threatening behavior and for staying outside the school instead of immediately confronting him.

This led to the resignations of several police officers who responded to the scene, and the removal of Sheriff Scott Israel.

A commission appointed by then-Governor Scott to investigate the shooting condemned the police inaction and urged school districts across the state to adopt greater measures of security.

On October 20, 2021, Cruz pleaded guilty to all charges and apologized for his crimes.

The prosecution sought the death penalty, and a four-month death penalty trial was expected to commence in January 2022.

After suffering numerous delays, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the trial commenced on July 18, 2022.

On October 13, 2022, a jury unanimously agreed that Cruz was eligible for the death penalty, but deadlocked on whether it should be imposed, resulting in a recommendation to sentence him to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

On November 2, 2022, Cruz was sentenced to life without parole, in accordance with a Florida law requiring the court not to depart from the jury's recommendation.

The unanimity required to impose the death penalty has since been overturned by a bill signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, partly as a result of Cruz's sentencing.

On February 14, 2018, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Miami suburban town of Parkland, Florida, United States, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others.

Cruz, a former student at the school, fled the scene on foot by blending in with other students and was arrested without incident approximately one hour and twenty minutes later in nearby Coral Springs.

Police and prosecutors investigated "a pattern of disciplinary issues and unnerving behavior".

The incident is the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history.

The shooting took place during the afternoon of February 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, an affluent suburb about 30 mi northwest of Fort Lauderdale and 45 mi northwest of Miami.

The shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was dropped off at the school by an Uber driver at 2:19 p.m., 20 minutes before dismissal time.

According to a police report, Cruz was carrying a rifle case and a backpack.

He was spotted and recognized by a campus monitor who radioed a colleague that he was walking "purposefully" toward Building 12.

The campus monitor did not declare a Code Red lockdown and sent a radio message to a colleague inside Building 12, which Cruz had entered.

The school's policies did not specify clearly who could order a lockdown, and staff had been trained not to order a lockdown unless they saw a gun or heard shots being fired.

The campus monitor who received the radio warning hid inside a janitor's closet after hearing shots being fired, and survived the attack.

Cruz entered Building 12, a three-story structure containing 30 classrooms typically occupied by about 900 students and 30 teachers.

Armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle and multiple magazines, Cruz entered a hallway and began firing indiscriminately at students and teachers.

A fire alarm went off, causing confusion because there had been a fire drill earlier in the day.

Cruz first killed three students in the hallway, then fired through the windows of four closed classroom doors, killing six more students and wounding thirteen others.

Students were unable to seek shelter at "hard corners"—areas of a classroom that people could safely hide at if a gunman peered through the window of a door—because many of the classrooms in Building 12 lacked one, and furniture otherwise obstructed potential safe spaces.

Out of the seventeen killed, fourteen were students while three were faculty members.

Two of those killed were students in Ivy Schamis' Holocaust History class; Schamis was teaching a class lesson on combating hate when Cruz fired shots into her classroom.

Around five students from Schamis' class were injured.

According to Schamis, Cruz was unaware he was shooting into a class on the Holocaust, even though he had scrawled swastikas onto the ammunition magazines that he left at the school.

As the shooting unfolded, a "Code Red" was still not called due to confusion among school employees over who had the authority to do so.

At about 2:21 p.m., a staff member eventually activated a lockdown, but only after discovering the body of a victim and hearing gunfire.

An armed school resource officer of the Broward County Sheriff's Office was on campus when the shooting broke out, and he remained outside between Building 12 and the adjacent Building 7.

After killing two staff members near a stairwell, Cruz went to the second floor, where he fired into two more classrooms but did not hit anyone.

On the third floor, he shot and killed five students and another staff member, who all had been stranded in the hallway; four other students were injured.

Next, he went into a teachers' lounge where he attempted to shoot out the hurricane-resistant windows facing the yard in order to target students and staff fleeing below, but failed.

After he stopped shooting (possibly due to a weapon malfunction), Cruz dropped his rifle on the third floor of the building and left the scene by blending in with fleeing students.

He then walked to a fast-food restaurant, stopping at a mall to get a soda on the way, and lingered before leaving on foot at 3:01 p.m. At about 3:41 p.m., police stopped Cruz 2 mi from the school in the Wyndham Lakes neighborhood of Coral Springs and arrested him as the suspected shooter.