the times | Friday July 31 2020 2GM 31
Wo r l d
A Florida couple “will for ever regret”
taking in the teenager accused of killing
17 people in one of America’s deadliest
high-school shootings, according to
their public letter of apology.
James and Kimberly Snead sheltered
Nikolas Cruz, an orphan, despite the
dire warnings of his former teachers,
neighbours and family members, and
allowed him to store an array of knives
and guns in their home.
Cruz is accused of killing 14 students,
a teacher, a coach and the school’s
athletics director with a semi-automat-
ic rifle, and wounding 17 others at Mar-
jory Stoneman Douglas High School in
Parkland, in February 2018, less than
Foster couple sorry for school massacre
United States
Charlie Mitchell
three months after they took him in.
Although he escaped by blending into a
group of fleeing students, Cruz, who
was 19, was arrested an hour later in
nearby Coral Springs.
The massacre shocked the nation
and surpassed the Columbine shoot-
ings in Colorado in 1999, in which 15
died, including the two perpetrators.
Many Parkland survivors, two of
whom killed themselves shortly after
the first anniversary of the shootings,
became gun control activists.
The couple said in their letter: “We
thought we could handle this troubled
young man. Unfortunately we were
wrong. We were particularly wrong to
allow him to store his firearms in our
house, including the AR-15 used in this
tragedy. We are profoundly sorry forthe actions and inactions which may
have contributed to Nikolas Cruz’s abil-
ity to carry out the murders.”
After the massacre more than a
dozen negligence lawsuits were filedagainst the couple, whose son was said
to have been friends with Cruz. The
letter is part of a legal settlement.
Appearing on television a week after
the shootings, Mr Snead, an army
veteran, said: “Everything everybodyseems to know, we didn’t know,” adding
that Cruz was polite and “seemed
normal”.
At the time the FBI was also accused
of not acting on warnings that Cruz had
a predisposition towards mass violence.
Cruz, now 21, whose trial is in
progress, had attention deficit hyper-
activity disorder and was called “emo-
tionally disturbed” by former teachers.
After his mother’s death in 2017 he
was briefly taken in by a neighbour,
Rocxanne Deschamps, but they parted
ways because she would not allow guns
in her home. Ms Deschamps later told
police that Cruz had dug holes in her
garden, she suspected to bury a weapon
that he had bought.
Ms Deschamps and Katherine
Blaine, a cousin of Cruz’s mother,warned the Sneads not to let the teen-
ager into their home. The couple were
reported to have met him only twice
before he moved in. “Kathy Blaine in-
formed us that Nikolas Cruz was vio-
lent, dangerous, infatuated with guns
and knives, untrustworthy and threat-
ened to kill people on Instagram,
among other things,” the Sneads wrote.
Ms Blaine said: “I blame them for not
listening to me; that’s what I blame
them for. Why the hell didn’t you listen
to Rocxanne and me, to get the guns
away from him?”
Andrew Pollack, whose daughter,
Meadow, was killed in the shooting,
told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel,
which first reported the letter: “[The
Sneads] didn’t want to accept account-
ability, and we forced it on them.”James and
Kimberly Snead
had met NikolasMara Soriano was unloading a removal
van at her new apartment in Vancouver
when she set down a rucksack contain-
ing a teddy bear and an iPad. Minutes
later the bag was stolen.
The thief took something irreplacea-
ble: press the bear’s paw and you hear
the final message recorded by Ms Sori-
ano’s dying mother for her daughter.
Days later, after a celebrity appeal
and an outpouring of public support,
bear and owner were reunited thanks
to two strangers who said they recog-
nised the thief from the security tape
and retrieved it. “As soon as I saw him
pull her out of the bag my knees just
buckled,” said Ms Soriano. “I started
sobbing and I grabbed her out of his
hands and I couldn’t let her go.”
An online video shows Ms Soriano
hugging the toy and listening to her late
mother’s voice. “Mama Bear’s home,”
she says. The message was recorded
shortly before her mother died of
cancer in June last year. Ms Soriano,
who was born in the Philippines, said it
also reminded her of home.
After the theft she appealed for help
on social media. The actor Ryan Rey-
nolds offered a C$5,000 reward for the
bear’s safe return. “Zero questions
asked,” he wrote. “We all need this bear
to come home.”
Thousands of Canadians also shared
an image of the bear and on Tuesday
Ms Soriano received the message she
was hoping for, leading to the reunion
the next day. Reynolds said: “To the
person who took the bear, thanks for
keeping it safe. Vancouver is awesome.”Abducted
teddy bear
returned
after appeal
Canada
Charlie Mitchell Ottawa
“Mama Bear’s home”: Mara Soriano is
happily reunited with her teddy bearA
giraffe the
same height as
four stacked
Minis has been
declared the
world’s tallest by
Guinness World Records
(Bernard Lagan writes).
Bindi Irwin, 22, the
daughter of the late
conservationist Steve
Irwin, whose family owns
the Australia Zoo in
Beerwah, Queensland,
announced the accolade
on Facebook: “Our
sweetheart Forest has
officially made it into the
Guinness World Recordsfor being the tallest living
giraffe! We are so proud
of our towering guy, he
has such a wonderful
heart.”
Forest, who is 5.7m (18ft
8in) tall and is part of the
zoo’s giraffe breeding
programme, has fathered
12 calves at the zoo, with
another due soon.
Adult males, or bulls,
typically measure
between 4.6m and 5.5m
and even newborns can
be the same height as an
adult man. “But towering
to the same height as a
stack of four Mini carsfrom the ground to the
tips of his ossicones —
the bony protuberances
on a giraffe’s head —
Forest is truly a
statuesque specimen,”
Guinness World Records
said.
Forest was born at
Auckland Zoo in New
Zealand in 2007 and was
moved to his new home
at the age of two. To
claim the record,
Australia Zoo staff
created a measuring pole
and rigged it close to a
hay dispenser. It took
several months to capture
the images that Guinness
World Records required
to assess his height
because Forest took time
to accept the new feeder.
“Encouraging him over
with some food andmaking him stand up
nice and tall with
cameras rolling is quite a
difficult feat,” Kat
Hansen, the zoo’s senior
African section keeper,
said. “We ended up using
a really large ruler and
encouraged him to put
his head up against that
ruler with cameras
coming from all angles.”
Forest is not likely to
take the award lying
down — giraffes seldom
lie down, even when they
are sleeping, Ms Hansen
has told the broadcaster
ABC. “They find lying
down quite a nervous
experience as it takes
them time to get up,” she
said. “They sleep standing
up... they have small
sleeps for about ten
minutes.”Giant giraffe rises
above tallest rivals
As the launch manager for Nasa’s Mars
2020 mission, Omar Baez could not
muster much enthusiasm for the name
of the agency’s rover, Perseverance,
when it was announced.
Five months later, as the rocket
carrying the robotic explorer thun-
dered into the sky from Cape Canaveral
Air Force Station in Florida yesterday,
sending it on a $3 billion mission the
pandemic had threatened to derail, he
admitted a change of heart. “I don’t
think you could pick a better matching
description of what the team is doing,”
he said. “Nobody’s given up.”
Mounted in the nose-cone of an Atlas
V rocket, the rover and Ingenuity, a
miniature helicopter, began a 309 mil-
lion-mile journey atop a plume of fire
and smoke.
Last night the spacecraft was experi-
encing technical difficulties after pass-
ing through the Earth’s shadow, which
briefly caused its temperature to drop
and triggered a “safe mode”.
When a vessel enters safe mode, it
shuts down all but essential systems
until it receives new commands from
mission control. “Right now, the Mars
2020 mission is completing a full health
assessment on the spacecraft and is
working to return the spacecraft to a
nominal configuration for its journey to
Mars,” Nasa said.
Eight years in the making, the
mission is the most challenging, high-
tech and ambitious in the history of
Mars exploration. The rover will seek
signs of ancient life and extract rock
samples to be sent to Earth, investigate
the climate and geology, and test tech-
nology that could support human ex-
ploration.
The chance to launch a large payload
to Mars arises every 26 months, for
three weeks, when the planet is aligned
with Earth on the same side of the sun.
Perseverance and Ingenuity arrived
for preflight processing at the Kennedy
Space Center (KSC) just as the pan-
demic was confirmed in the US in mid-
February.
The 2,000-odd engineers, scientists
and technicians at Nasa’s Jet Propul-
sion Laboratory in California, where
the vehicles were built and from where
the mission is managed, and 450 work-
ers at the KSC, faced the challenge of
preparing an interplanetary odyssey
from their kitchen tables in lockdown.
Perseverance
pays off as
rover heads
to red planet
Jacqui Goddard Cape Canaveral
AUSTRALIA ZOOForest, who is 5.7m
tall, has fathered
12 calves at the
Australia Zoo