Questions Emerge Over Florida Shooter's "Full Metal Garb" from Zero Hedge

 

Questions Emerge Over Florida Shooter's "Full Metal Garb"

by Tyler Durden

Mon, 02/26/2018 - 16:55

 

Just as we saw with the massacre in Las Vegas, a number of questions and inconsistencies have arisen following the Parkland High School shooting.
As Intellhub's Shepard Ambellas reports, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School teacher Stacy Lippel was grazed by a hot bullet which left the chamber of the shooter’s gun as she closed the door
to her classroom after letting a number of students file into what would presumably be safety. However, nothing could have prepared the teacher for what she was to witness next.

“I suddenly saw the shooter about twenty feet in front of me standing at the end of the hallway actively shooting down the hallway, just a barrage of bullets, and I’m staring at him thinking why are the police here,this is strange because he’s in full metal garb, helmet, face mask, bulletproof armor, shooting this rifle that I’ve never seen before,” Lippel told Good Morning America last Wednesday.

The brave teacher said she told fellow Stoneman Douglas H.S. teacher Scott Beigel, 35, to get back in his room just before the shooter fired a number of rounds into his room killing him and other students. Lippel said the shooter fired four to five rounds into her classroom which shattered the classroom door window before the heavily-claded assassin continued his diabolic shooting spree down the hallway.
“I never really knew when he left because we all thought he was still here,” she said.
Two of Lippel’s students were fatally wounded in the attack.
Police maintain the suspect Nikolas Cruz arrived via an Uber ride at 2:19 p.m. and initiated his attack within 1 minute. If true, that would mean that Cruz would have had to suit up into full metal body armor, put on a full helmet and the whole nine yards, all the while assembling an AR-15 rifle which was purportedly packed into a duffel bag with a number of fully-loaded magazines.
An affidavit filed by the Broward County Sheriff states: “Cruz stated that he was the gunman who entered the school campus armed with an AR-15 and began shooting students that he saw in the hallways and on the school grounds. Cruz stated that he brought additional loaded magazines to the school campus and kept them hidden in a backpack until he got on campus to begin his assault.”
An NBC News report gives the official timeline of events:

Within barely two minutes of being dropped off, Cruz started firing into four classrooms in Building 12, returning to two of them to shoot again, Israel said.
Cruz then went upstairs to the second floor, where he shot one of his victims, before proceeding to the third floor, where he ditched his rifle and backpack, Israel said.
He then ran down the stairs and outside, where he blended in with hundreds of terrified students — many of them his former classmates — and eluded officers as he left campus, Israel said.
Amid the chaos he’d left behind at the school, Cruz made his way to a Walmart store, bought a drink at its Subway restaurant and walked away again, Israel said.

Such a scenario seems not only entirely unlikely but almost impossible.
How does the purported shooter exit his Uber ride, put on full body dress, helmet, assemble his rifle, load it and start firing at targets within two minutes?
While that interview raises a few questions, it is not unusual for witness recollections to be wildly different from one another.
However, as The Chicago Tribune reported, one of the students was wearing a bulletproof vest given to him by his policeman father:

In the classroom where Mackenzie Hill had been hiding, police broke through the door. As the officers were guiding students out, they noticed something odd: One of the students had put on a bulletproof vest.
The student said he'd been given the vest by his father, a police officer.
Even in the safest city in Florida, he'd brought it to school with him, just in case.

Finally, as one commentator notes, one of the pictures from The Sun article shows the alleged shooter holding a gun looks like it has an orange tip...


Certainly plenty of questions remain unanswered.  As Intellihub's Shaprd Ambellas concludes...
... prosecutors have already offered Cruz a deal to spare his life in exchange for his plead of guilt. However, if school cameras, video footage, and other hard evidence reveals that Cruz was, in fact, the shooter, why would there be a need for Cruz to plead guilty? Wouldn’t the case be cut and dry?