A Florida high school, a self-described mentally ill teen and a school shooting. If it sounds familiar, it should. Except this was Sky Bouche rather than Nikolas Cruz. He smuggled a sawed off shotgun into school Friday and fired a single shot that wounded one student.
Another difference: rather than following the Scot Peterson protocols and waiting outside the building as the shooter works his way through the building, Forest High School’s resource officer, Marion County Deputy James Long, made a bee-line for the shooter.
The Forest resource officer, Marion County Sheriff’s Deputy James Long, “did not hesitate. He went right in,” Woods said at a news conference. Woods said Long heard a “large, loud banging sound” and immediately responded.
That’s right, a good guy with a gun who was on school grounds ran toward the sound of gunfire.
BREAKING: “I just shot through the door” Suspected Forest High School Shooter Sky Bouche walks on his way to jail. @news6wkmg pic.twitter.com/kO6vsbCQed
— Nadeen Yanes (@NadeenNews6) April 20, 2018
Unlike the Parkland shooting, Bouche apparently intended the gunfire as a cry for help.
‘I prepared to go and scare people,’ Sky Bouche recalled of the attack on Friday morning at Forest High School in Ocala, Florida, in a televised interview from behind bars with KTVU.
‘Put my shotgun in my guitar case, took two pills of Phenibut, put my tactical vest in my backpack and went to Forest,’ Bouche said. Phenibut is an anti-anxiety medication which is banned in the US but obtainable online. . . .
Bouche said that when he entered the school a girl walked by him, but he hesitated in pulling out the gun. ‘I just didn’t want to shoot or kill people, because at that point the adrenaline and the excitement just kind of faded immediately.’
Instead, he said fired through a door and dropped the gun, thinking he hadn’t hit anyone. But a 17-year-old boy on the other side of the door was struck in the ankle.
‘I could have pumped the shotgun. I didn’t, I just dropped it,’ Bouche said. Addressing the injured student he added, ‘There’s nothing I can say, I can say sorry all I want, but he can think what he wants.’
‘This is what I wanted, was to be away from everyone else, so I’m not hurting anyone else,’ he said, sitting stony faced in jailhouse stripes. ‘That was my primary goal. Cause I knew if I didn’t, you know, snap now, it would have been later and it would’ve been a hundred times worse.’
Bouche then turned himself in to a former teacher and waited until the SRO arrived.
The two spoke until school resource officer Deputy Jim Long and principal Brent Carson arrived and took the troubled teenager into custody.
Speaking to detectives, Bouche said the motive was to ‘inflict fear in students, but he did not intend to kill anyone.’
He told police that he purchased the shotgun in a private sale a week after the Parkland shooting and that there was no paperwork or background check for the transaction as it was a private sale.
There appears to be a significant difference in the quality of training and personnel between Broward County and Marion County. There hasn’t been any grandstanding or moral preening on the part of Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods. What a difference a few hundred miles make.