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Sunday, February 18, 2018
On Saturday, Zachary Cruz, 17, half-brother of suspected school shooter Nikolas Cruz, 19, was removed from a mobile home park in Lantana, Florida, to a mental health facility.
An unreleased facility involuntarily committed Zachary using Florida’s Baker Act, which allows individuals suspected by law enforcement of being mentally unstable to be placed under psychiatric and psychological observation for 12 hours. All American states and territories have similar laws with variable conditions and lengths of time. The details of his commitment are confidential under federal HIPPA laws and other federal laws giving mental health records special protections.
Roxanne Deschamps owned the mobile home where Zachary Cruz resided. A confrontation with Nikolas, about his firearms, split the brothers. Deschamps’s Facebook account says, “[Nikolas] bought a gun and wanted to bring it into my house … Violence and gun not accepted in my house.”
The mental health of the Cruz brothers, among other factors, is being closely examined by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Political and community leaders are examining gun control methods that involve mental health.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has long warned that mental health patients are perceived as more violent than they really are and are more likely to be the victims of violence than the general population. Two out of three Seriously Mentally Ill (SMI) patients have been the targets of violent acts, but violent SMI patients make up only 3-5% of the mentally ill population.