完整的文字记录。IRE播客--射手

IRE播客。射手的故事

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: February 14, 2018. It was a Wednesday and a relatively calm one in the Sun Sentinel newsroom in South Eastern Florida. City Hall reporter, Brittany Wallman was chatting with the managing editor at her desk about new technologies in journalism. But their conversation was cut short when they heard someone in the newsroom say, “Oh my gosh Stoneman Douglas is on CNN and the headline said something about a shooting”.

: We want to bring you up to date on a still active and developing situation. I am sorry to have to report here that we’re talking about a high school. Shots have been fired. This is Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School if you know it, this is Parkland Florida.

: We have no information on whether there are any victims. We know we’ve seen one person coming out on a stretcher.

: The beginnings of what would become known as the Parkland mass shooting were unfolding before the newsroom’s eyes. Before the day was done, 17 people would be dead and 17 more would be wounded. And one of the deadliest school shootings in modern American history. On this week’s episode Sun Sentinel reporters Brittany Wallman and Megan O’Matz walk us through how they investigated the shooter, Nikolas Cruz in the chaotic hours after he walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas with a semi-automatic rifle in tow. Their reporting pieced together a profile of Cruz as a lost and lonely killer.

: What we’ve discovered through a whole lot of records and interviews was that Nikolas Cruz had a very troubled life starting very early on and that he had many many many interventions from people in a position to have done something over the years. There were a lot of red flags and a whole lot of when you look at it now, eerie exclamations from him that he wanted to kill people.

: I am Tessa Weinberg and you’re listening to the IRE Radio Podcast. As the number of victims from the shooting continue to grow Sun Sentinel reporters mobilized and began to look for answers.

: So much was happening all at once. That first day we didn’t know how serious it was of course how many were dead. You know who the shooter was. All those things were just, you know mysteries that were coming together very fast. On that first day or so, there’s a lot of confusion a lot of chaos. Even the authorities don’t even know what’s right. They’re trying to understand what happened as well.

: That’s Megan O’Matz an investigative reporter at the Sun Sentinel who worked with Brittany and a team of reporters to dig into Cruz’s background. Megan had been driving back from an assignment when she heard news of the shooting. Her home was closer than the office. So she headed there to start making calls. Back in the newsroom, Brittany’s first thought was about her own teenage daughter who attends a different public school.

: 我知道他们一定很害怕，即使做了20年的记者也没有对那么大的事情感到麻木。

: There was no mass email to the newsroom saying, “All hands on deck”. After covering numerous hurricanes and an airport shooting the year before Sun Sentinel journalists knew how to respond to breaking news. They looked for ways in and started reporting. Brittany’s first step was to see what was unfolding on social media.

: I was on Twitter because I’m a big Twitter fan and I’m always on Twitter. And that really in this story was a great tool for not just finding out information but finding videos or actually first-person accounts, it was really amazing because students were on there.

: 布列塔尼在新闻编辑室周围发送值得注意的推文，并确保监测其他媒体的报道。在这种规模的突发新闻情况下。布列塔尼希望能注意到其他记者的发现。

: This was something where not just everybody in our newsroom was converged, but every single major news organization in the country was covering this in a breaking news story. Different reporters are finding different things. So if we saw a source and witness that some other outlet had come across somebody had to make note of that name, is this somebody we want to come back to or here’s a record we want to get.

: To find sources who might know Cruz personally. Brittany turned to Facebook. Lynda Cruz, Nikolas’ mother had died in 2017, but her Facebook page was still active. So Brittany started there and began to send friend requests to Linda’s friends.

: Everybody that uses Facebook knows that if you’re not friends with the person and you send a message they’re not going to see it. But you do see when somebody tries to friend you. So I started trying to friend people.

: 在布列塔尼搜索社交媒体的同时，其他记者也开始挖掘记录。

: To me, there’s sort of a triage, an order of operations when you’re covering something big. You’ve got to first get your records request in because those are going to take awhile. And there are a lot of public records in this case. There’s probate stuff and there were some school records. There were sheriff’s office records. 911 calls, and transcripts and just all manner of records.

: 克鲁兹在童年时曾搬家。因此，记者想要确定的第一件事就是他所居住过的地方的地址。

: That was key so that we could then request any police incidents at those addresses. And he had lived in addresses that were covered by different law enforcement agencies, so that’s different requests that had to be made.

: 尽早提出这些要求是一个巨大的帮助。

: I would say some of the most interesting records and 911 calls were from the sheriff’s offices just asking for all activity at these addresses over the years. And that was how you see that everything from when he was little and he threw a rock at someone to going to buy a gun when he was older.

: While those documents told reporters more about Cruz’s home life. There were still holes in the story. But they found that many of the records that would tell them more weren’t public.

: You’re dealing with confidential student records. You’re dealing with mental health records. You’re dealing with a child, for most of his life. So a lot of these things are not open records. We’re dealing with an active criminal investigation and a nationally high profile case that the whole country in the world is watching. So officials are clamping down. People are scared to be quoted.

: The reporter’s next option. Asking sources to leak them records for example, Cruz had changed schools over the years, and the reporters wanted to see what school disciplinary records might tell them. But those were confidential.

: 他的学校记录很复杂，因为我的意思是，当他做枪击案时，他已经19岁了，所以他有完整的学校历史。

: 我们不得不聚集在一起，说我们是否认识一个老师，他可能愿意向我们透露他的纪律记录？什么样的老师会有这样做的动机？我们应该尝试找到这样的老师吗？因此，我们只是试图制定战略，确定谁可能对我们有最大的帮助。

: 让消息来源泄露记录需要说服力和同情心。

: 他们想告诉你一些事情，但有些人不愿意得到你的记录，或者担心如果他们进入一个系统并为你调出记录，他们的指纹会被发现。因此，这些事情只是我们每天都在处理的挑战，是让人们对帮助我们感到舒服。

: Basically, we said we’re trying to tell the story and help people understand what went wrong and how this could have been prevented and what is wrong with the system. And you know we want the truth to come out. A lot of people if you appeal to the idea of the truth and getting to the truth, most people are agreeable to that.

: 他们在每个地方都发现了痛苦的父母、家庭成员、政府官员。

: So there was so much outrage in so many different elements of the story that people wanted to get that out there. And I think in something like this you’re weighing that you’re going to get in trouble for releasing a record. I mean are you really going to get penalized because you released a record of somebody that shot 34 people and 17 of them died?

: And in some ways, the fact that the shooting happened in the Sun Sentinel’s backyard gave them an advantage. They had well established relationships with sources in the community and they knew they could trust them.

: We’re in this community. We covered this. We know our sources. We know who’s reliable. And so when people were giving us information it wasn’t that we doubted that the documents that we were getting were not correct. And that’s because we have such deep ties here. I think if I were parachuting into another community where I didn’t know who I was dealing with, I would have more concern about the authenticity of documents. But in this case, we knew precisely who we were dealing with.

: As information rolled in it became essential that reporters stay organized. They traced Cruz’s life using a timeline. In a situation like this with so many moving parts, they needed more than one.

: 我的意思是，我们为他制定了各种时间线。一条是他与警察互动的时间线，另一条是他学校事件的时间线，另一条是他生活的总体时间线，涉及他何时出生、他父亲何时去世、他们何时搬到某个地方以及他们何时买的房子。我的意思是时间线在这方面真的很有帮助。因此，当你写下日期和发生的事情时，你可以更容易看到生活的模式。

: 他们记下了他们学到的每一个细节，并将其按时间顺序排列。

: 就这样，我们意识到，在他被赶出马乔里-斯通曼-道格拉斯高中的三天后，他买了那把枪，用来杀害学生和教育工作者。

: 梅根从一份逮捕报告中知道，克鲁兹在2017年2月购买了他在枪击案中使用的枪支。她还从学校记录中知道，他在同一个月被开除。

: 所以我想比对一下被开除和买枪之间有多少天。而这些是在不同的记录中。你必须知道这些信息的存在，并试图知道它们可以配合在一起。

: 由于《太阳哨兵报》的另一位记者采访了克鲁兹购买武器的枪械店的律师，他们能够找到他购买武器的确切日期。这一事实在任何公共记录中都是如此。

: So indeed it turned out that he had bought the gun three days after being expelled. I mean he didn’t use it for another year. But just the fact that he had bought it within three days was, I think very interesting and telling and we use that in the profile.

: And that to me was just a profound fact. And so it was a lot of collaboration with other reporters and going across the room and saying, “Hey, do you know this and do you know that,” which we continued to do because we’ll be the ones that will keep the story alive.

: Bit by bit the records and interviews, reporters were able to stitch together a snapshot of Nikolas Cruz. He had been adopted at birth and raised in a loving family. An anecdote from a source helped the reporters better understand his childhood. A tipster had told Brittany that if she went to a local park she would see how devoted Cruz’s mother, Lynda, had been to the community and to her sons. The source said Cruz and his adopted brother’s names can be found at the park because Lynda had helped build it.

: We sent a reporter out to the park. She looked all over the place and she found the boys’ names. They were on fence slats, and there was a fence slat that said Nikolas J Cruz on it and the one next to it said Zachary Cruz. We took a picture. And of course, as soon as the city saw that in the story, they went and took those fence slats out. But it was just such a cool detail to have in there that really was very telling about what kind of mom Lynda Cruz was.

: 但林达不得不独自抚养3岁时被诊断为发育迟缓的克鲁兹。

: 在他生活的大部分时间里，他的母亲是一个单亲家庭。他的父亲去世了。他还有一个领养的兄弟，也有一些情绪上的挣扎。因此，这是一个正在处理非常具有挑战性的男孩的女人。你可以从警方的报告中看到，她经常打电话。

: 克鲁兹被诊断出患有情绪和行为障碍。而梅根产生了一个长长的清单，每次提到一个都会注意到。

: 其中一些是在学校记录中。有些是在警察来的时候，妈妈会告诉他们的事情。所以我想出了一个清单：多动症、情绪行为障碍、妈妈说的强迫症、愤怒问题。所以这显然是一个有很多问题的孩子。

: 随着克鲁兹年龄的增长，他的问题更加严重。他在学校引起了一些问题，在八年级时，他换了一家为情绪和行为障碍儿童提供课程的机构。一份学校系统的报告向记者展示了他如何开始失去控制。

: It was before he went to Stoneman Douglas. It was sort of evaluating whether he was ready to go to a “normal” school and it talked about it, he checks on his grades a lot. I mean he was very interested in his academics and getting good grades. And then it would just say like, “Oh, but he has poor judgment. A peer told him to jump off the back of a bus and he did. And he is very interested in terrorists and guns and killing. And then the next sentence would be, “Nikolas doesn’t always raise his hand in class.” And reading that it was just so stunning.

: School officials took note of Cruz’s concerning behavior. So did state agencies and the FBI. Someone close to the family had tipped off the FBI that they were concerned Nikolas Cruz might become a school shooter based on posts on social media accounts. And before that a blogger had alerted the FBI that a user named Nikolas Cruz had commented on his YouTube page writing, “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”

: It showed that there were failures at every single level. And it was so strange in this case where you might as well have been walking around with a billboard on that said, “I want to shoot up a school,” because he essentially said those things the police had numerous numerous encounters with him. I mean there were just for so many things.

: Cruz’s difficulties in school were only compounded by his mother’s death in November 2017, just a few months before the shooting. Cruz was devastated and lost, sources told the reporters. And the brothers went to live with a former neighbor. It didn’t last long. Cruz got into a fight with the neighbor and her son and he was kicked out. In a transcript of a 911 call, Cruz can be heard describing the fight to a dispatcher.

: 而你只是呆在这所房子里，你生气了，你打了东西，然后他们来找你。

: 是的。

: 好吧。

: The thing is I lost my mother a couple of years ago. So I’m dealing with a bunch of things right now.

: 我明白。

: 他的声音开始断断续续，你可以听到这个失去母亲的年轻人有一点情绪。

: These were just some of the moments reporters unearthed about Cruz’s troubled life. As reporters learn more and more about the teen they tried their best to accurately represent who he was.

: People have histories and things and events that shaped them. And it’s up to us to try to explain that fully so that others can understand it. So we don’t know the true motive for this shooting if we’ll ever know one. I mean he’s just a really seriously disturbed individual. But these all point to stresses on him. So we are just trying to portray the major events in his life and a little bit more about his background and what he was suffering from and dealing with throughout his life.

: 布列塔尼在思考如何写好克鲁兹的时候，借鉴了自己的生活经验。

: My dad was a prison warden and I lived my whole younger life around people that had committed crimes basically. And I know are human beings and it’s not a black and white deal and everybody has a story to tell and that Nikolas had a sad life. I mean it was sad. The truth is the truth. And it’s important for people to understand what leads to something like this and especially in this case we don’t really have a motive per se. We don’t know that he targeted specific people. We don’t know why he chose that day a year after he bought the gun. And so to understand the only place you can go is his history and his childhood.

: And when Megan went to one of Cruz’s first court appearances after the shooting, it struck her that no one from his family had appeared in court for him.

: 这是一个迷失和孤独的人的简介，当他最终为这个问题出庭时，他的第一次出庭，法庭上没有人支持他。

: One thing that really rang out was how alone he was multiple people had used the descriptions of lost and lonely in describing him which really struck me. And people that commented on the story some people did criticize it for being too sympathetic to him which is what I figured would happen. But I think it’s important to be fair even to a mass murderer.

: Not long after the shooting national media outlets packed their cameras and headed out to cover the next breaking story. So it’s up to the local reporters to report on the aftermath the shooting is having on their community.

: Nothing that we’ve ever covered here has had such an impact on the community and just saturated the entire community with sadness. The first two weeks I could have cried at any moment. I probably still could just thinking about all of the different losses. And some of the videos that we saw that we didn’t use that were just horrible seeing what these children went through. It hasn’t been the same. Everywhere you go, everyone’s talking about it.

: Reporters have pitched in to cover the shootings aftermath while still maintaining their regular beats. They’ve seen the effects of the shooting spill into other areas as the debates ensue about school safety gun laws and active shooter drills. For even the Sun Sentinel’s most experienced reporters, the Parkland shooting has been unlike anything they have ever seen before.

: This is not a typical story. This is not the kind of story that I’ve experienced in the past. It is of an intense nature that is keeping on day after day with many many new elements. And I don’t know when it will be “over”. We are all heartbroken by what happened. We can’t not be affected by the idea of all these children dying in their classrooms and it tears you up.

: It’s the small gestures of support that have made the relentless reporting a bit easier. Journalists across the country have sent the Sun Sentinel candy and stuffed animals. They’ve paid for bar tabs and offered reassuring words.

: 实际上，现在在新闻编辑室，我们有一些治疗犬，因为记者需要治疗。但一些去马乔里-斯通曼-道格拉斯(Marjory Stoneman Douglas)让孩子们感觉更好的治疗犬今天也在新闻编辑室里。

: Outside of the newsroom, the reporters have tried to take the occasional day off for mental health, but it’s been hard. Things at home began to slip, whether it’s the laundry, groceries or the kid’s daycare. Megan had just started a kitchen renovation when the shooting happened.

: You just kind of come home at the end of the day and you collapse. And for me I’m sweeping up sawdust and just hoping I can eventually get my kids in together again. But you know you do put it into perspective because that’s a minor thing versus what all these families are dealing with who lost loved ones and there are many many many professionals in our community whether they’re school officials or police that are also doing their jobs in a way that is very intense and long long hours. And it’s not just the media.

: The community has noticed the paper’s dedication. The Sun Sentinel has unearthed new information in the case and dedicated teams of journalists to cover the aftermath.

: 人们对我们表示了极大的感谢。我们从社区得到了如此多的积极反馈，感谢我们给予这个100%的关注和如此多的报道。因此，我们肯定做了正确的事情。

: In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the school district put out a statement asking the media not to reach out to the victims’ families.

: This is such a great illustration of why that is an offensive and ridiculous request asking the media please don’t invade the space of victims’ families because of what happened here. They had something to say and it became an entire movement.

: 从全国性的游行到佛罗里达州的新枪法，记者们知道这只是一个开始。展望未来，报道的一些最重要的方面将是回访以前犹豫不决的消息来源，并对记录请求进行细致的跟踪。梅根说，保持组织性是非常重要的。她说，她喜欢对记录进行复制和备份，无论是在闪存盘上，还是通过电子邮件发送到另一个私人服务器上，或者打印出来。

: And all of that may not look very flashy or may not be evident initially, but it really really helps as you’re putting these stories together. Is to gather every record you can know where it is, keep track of it keep track of your record request and be able to identify pieces that will fit together down the line. Because again, this story is going to go on for months and months and months.

: The reporters may not know when things will go back to normal in Parkland Florida if they ever will, but they do know this. They’ll be around for however long it takes.

: 这是一项耐力赛。你知道你必须回到它。你必须有足够的精神力量，在其他人都去做其他故事之后，继续挖掘这个故事。我认为我们对社区负有责任，不能放弃。

: Thanks for listening. Take a look at our episode notes for links to the Sun Sentinel’s investigation, as well as resources for reporting on guns trauma and breaking news. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or Google Play or wherever else you get your podcast. And you can spend hours listening to the stories behind some of the best investigative reporting in the country. At IRE.org/podcast. The IRE Radio Podcast is recorded in the studios of KBIA. Blake Nelson draws our art for each episode. Sarah Hutchins is our editor. From Columbia Missouri, I am Tessa Weinberg.

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