Florida Couple Who Took In Shooter: 'We Didn't Know'
Image Credit: Pool/Getty
Original Article | Author: Joe Crowe
James and Kimberly Snead, the couple who took in Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who has been accused in the Wednesday shootings at a Florida high school, said they have experienced a "roller coaster of emotions" and they did not foresee Cruz’s alleged actions.
"Everything everybody seems to know, we didn’t know," James Snead said Monday on "Good Morning America."
"It’s a roller coaster of emotions. It’s still tough. We’re still hurting. We’re still grieving," James Snead said.
James Snead, a U.S. Army veteran, and Kimberly Snead, a nurse, took in Cruz in November after his adoptive mother died of pneumonia. Their son was a friend of Cruz’s.
"We had rules, and he followed every rule to the T," James Snead said. One of the rules when Cruz moved in was that he had to get a gun safe for his weapons. "I thought I had the only key to the gun safe," James Snead added.
The couple said that the only thing out of the ordinary was that Cruz did not go to school on that Wednesday, which was Valentine’s Day. "He said he did not go to school on Valentine’s Day," James Snead said.
The husband said that he did not know about the shootings until a SWAT team contacted him.
Snead said he found out "after the SWAT team called me, asking if I knew where my son Nikolas was. I said he’s not my son, but I don’t know where he’s at. Then at that point I got in touch with my son, who was fleeing the scene at that point," James Snead said.
Kimberly Snead said in the interview that she saw the suspect at the police station after the arrest. "I went after him… everything I wanted to say, I tried to reserve myself," she said. The couple said that Cruz said he was "sorry."
"I didn’t hear that. I was just furious and heartbroken," Kimberly Snead said.
"I still can’t process what he’s done, because this isn’t the person we knew," she added.
Cruz had texted their son and told him he was going to the movies, James Snead said.
The couple has opened their house and their phones to the FBI, their attorney Jim Lewis said in the interview. "These are good people who are trying to do the right thing," Lewis said.
The couple said Sunday that they did not see the side of Cruz that could have committed the shootings. "We had this monster living under our roof and we didn’t know," Kimberly Snead told The Florida Sun Sentinel.
ALSO SEE:
