Nikolas Cruz
American mass shooter and former student of Stoneman Douglas High School
Nikolas Jacob Cruz (born September 24, 1998) is an American mass shooter who perpetrated the Parkland high school shooting, one of the deadliest school shootings in the United States. On February 14, 2018, Cruz killed seventeen people, including fourteen students and three staff members, while injuring seventeen others, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. In November 2022, Cruz was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. It remains the deadliest highschool shooting by a lone shooter in the United States.
Cruz had been known for his behavioral problems since preschool, and as a teenager on social media, he shared his obsessions with mass shootings and expressed racist, sexist, antisemitic, xenophobic, and homophobic views. He was a member of the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps. He legally purchased various firearms before the shooting.
Early life
Cruz was born to Brenda Norma Woodard (June 25, 1956 – August 23, 2021) on September 24, 1998, in Margate, Florida. Woodard was described as a career criminal who had once been arrested for attempting to buy crack cocaine while pregnant with her son. His biological father's identity is unknown.
The public source identifies “Nikolas Cruz” as american mass shooter and former student of Stoneman Douglas High School. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Nikolas, Cruz and American.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q48886558. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998, 2018, 2022 and 1956.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nikolas Cruz” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.