Across Florida, disturbed kids dream of shooting up their schools. An alarming number have guns close by.

A Broward County eighth grader, who worried he had multiple personalities, vowed to kill half the school, according to a police affidavit. The boy kept a notebook with a countdown to “death day.” A 14-year-old girl in Seminole County, in central Florida, took pride in being able to name the most infamous school shooters and wrote in her journal that she was saving money “to get a GOOD gun.” A “voice” instructed one Miami-Dade 16-year-old to kill people. And, in still another instance, a 16-year-old Pinellas County student asked a classmate: “Do you want to know how it feels to kill somebody?” The details are buried in court cases filed to prevent these young people from buying or possessing guns. Together, the cases illustrate the depth of mental illness and despair raging through today’s young people, a picture generally shielded by privacy laws and concealed from other parents. The cases were filed under Florida’s new Red Flag law, approved after the Parkland shooting. The law empowers judges to issue risk protection orders to disarm people who appear on the verge of suicide or murder. The orders are used primarily against adults. The Sun Sentinel is the first news outlet to isolate cases involving children and teens, to better understand the risks facing young people and the monumental job of making schools safe. Page after page of children’s school journals, social media postings and affidavits from those who know them best reveal dozens of students with the same traits as Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz: emotionally disturbed, tormented by mental disorders, lacking the proper medication or therapies, obsessed with death, and nursing a dark grudge against teachers or classmates. Police interview a 12-year-old who said an invisible person told him to bring a BB gun to school. He fired it in the school office, setting off a Code Red panic. The Sun Sentinel reviewed 100 risk protection orders filed from March 2018 through August 2019 against people 19 or younger. • In more than half the cases, children had access to guns at home, the records show. Some families had assault weapons in their homes, and some children posed on social media with handguns or other weapons. In one instance, a Volusia County middle schooler and his buddy made a video posing with an assault weapon and bullets they got from under his parent’s bed. A mentally ill 12-year-old in Miami-Dade posted a picture on Snapchat with a gun, threatening to kill “the people who snitched on me.” In his beachfront condo, his father had three handguns, a Beretta shotgun, an AR-15, an AK-style assault rifle, ammunition and speed loaders. • Before making deadly threats, children in at least a quarter of the cases had committed violent acts in the past. One boy beat a random man with a hammer. Another punched his school principal in the face. A middle schooler sexually assaulted a 7-year-old. Still another committed armed robbery. • In more than a third of the cases reviewed by the Sun Sentinel, the children claimed they wanted to die. Kids cut themselves and envisioned murder-suicides. Two girls south of Lakeland, ages 11 and 12, drew up plans to kill multiple students because they wanted to die and be with Satan. They brought knives, scissors and a pizza cutter to school, hid in the restroom and waited for their prey — smaller kids they could overpower. Among their text messages: “We shouldn’t have met each other lol. Now Death is near.” They were arrested. In addition to the protection orders, more and more children and teens are being arrested for making written threats to kill, according to data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Police made 293 such arrests in 2018 alone. A decade earlier, there were 32. Arrests for written threats to kill (19 and younger) The Sun Sentinel is not publishing the names of the mentally troubled young people because of their age. But community leaders say the details confirm a need for a sustained and comprehensive education and mental health campaign to dissuade young people from using threats of lethal violence as their go-to solution to anger, frustration, bullying or hopelessness. The cases also demonstrate the enormous burden educators and police have in determining who is serious and has the means to carry out an attack — and who is just engaging in adolescent foolishness. “We can’t tell the difference. And words matter,” said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. “So we’re taking every threat as a serious threat.” Authorities can’t be wrong. The stakes are too high. Sweeping mental illness In nearly half of the cases reviewed by the Sun Sentinel, the children who made the threats had disorders that affected their emotions and behaviors. Many had past histories of psychiatric hospitalizations. They carried various labels, sometimes multiple ones: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anger issues, manic depressive disorder, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder, delusions, anxiety, conduct disorder and intellectual disorders. What is Oppositional Defiant Disorder Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Conduct Disorder Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Intermittent Explosive Disorder Emotional/behavioral Disability ? People with ODD act out more than others their age, exhibiting anger, refusing to follow instructions, seeking revenge, deliberately trying to bother others, blaming other people for their mistakes and losing their temper. ODD usually is evident before age 8. Commonly occurs with ADHD. The kids attended all types of schools: public, private, charter and others. One mentally troubled boy had a history of murderous threats and violence. Several kids in Spanish class heard the 17-year-old say he was going to shoot up his school in Lakeland. When police responded, the student barraged the police officer with racist and vulgar language. Other students documented what they heard. “At least once a week he makes a ‘joke’ about shooting up the school,” one student wrote in an affidavit. According to a police affidavit, the youth spent 46 weeks in a psychiatric unit in 2015. Although his dad told police his son is “capable of being violent enough that it would make the news,” the judge was not convinced and denied the petition to keep him away from guns. In Jacksonville, another 17-year-old threatened a shooting at a public magnet school. The teen suffered from a history of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia. He was homeless and had been expelled from school for fighting, before posting threats a few months later against his former school. He had a history of threatening to kill people. “It will be the best murder suicide of all school shootings,” he wrote to a friend on the Snapchat social media app. Often children in Florida are taken from schools straight to psychiatric hospitals for evaluation, under the state’s Baker Act, which allows people to be held up to 72 hours in a locked ward if they appear intent on hurting themselves or others. From 2002 to 2018, the number of times the Baker Act was used for children increased by 141%, according to the University of South Florida, which tracks the figures. That dramatically outpaced the rising population of young people, which increased by only 13% during that time. Baker Act use per 100k children Of the children hospitalized in 2018, most were suicidal. But one in four wanted to kill someone else, too. A Secret Service study released in July found that two-thirds of the attackers in recent mass shootings exhibited symptoms of mental illness, though many of them had not been diagnosed or treated. The records examined by the Sun Sentinel showed instances, too, where children were clearly ill but either refused treatment or were unable to access the right kind of help. An 18-year-old in Coral Springs hit his father with a chair in early 2019, charged at him with a shovel and vowed to get gasoline and set the house on fire. He was arrested. His dad told police the teen had mood swings but refused mental health treatment. A few months later, while taking a college entrance exam at Coral Glades High, that teen became irate at the test proctor, pushed over chairs, hurled racial insults at a security guard and shouted: “Just you wait. ... I’m gonna come back and shoot up the school and kill everyone.” He was arrested again. Max Schachter wants to know how many other children could be as dangerous as the gunman who killed his son Alex during the Parkland school shooting. He asks Dan Gohl, the chief academic officer for Broward County Public Schools. In another case, in Hillsborough County, a mentally ill teen turned to a popular online forum for advice to stop his homicidal thoughts, despite having a therapist. “Almost every day I wake up wanting to kill,” he wrote. “Usually it’s a person that has wronged me but sometimes I just want to kill anyone. Sometimes when I don’t wake up wanting to kill I get the urge throughout the day. I don’t want to end up committing murder but I don’t know how to stop it. Please help. ... I would seek help but I’m still in high school.” Not long ago, the Broward school district analyzed its data and found that 75 students last school year had accumulated 100 or more disciplinary incidents — each — over their academic careers. Of those, slightly more than half were students with a behavioral disability. The other half, experts said, were likely to have some disorder that was not properly identified or handled. The shockingly young The graphic threat of mass shootings pervades even elementary schools, where the youngest children quickly get a darker education than their parents expected, the Sun Sentinel found. In a childlike scrawl, an 8-year-old boy in Winter Haven gave a signed affidavit saying that a girl told him to “shut your mouth,” and when he refused to stop talking, she told him: “I’m gonna kill you with a gun.” In Lakeland last year, a 9-year-old boy threatened to kill two classmates and his parents, court records state. He said he had a gun in his book bag and showed another student a 9 mm bullet he said he had found on the side of a road. “He showed me the bullet, it was silver,” another child wrote in a police affidavit. The new reality has police officers across Florida taking sworn testimony from baby-faced witnesses and suspects. A 12-year-old in Fort Lauderdale told police he had a voice in his head giving him orders. He had threatened to shoot up his school, prompting a Code Red lockdown when he fired a realistic-looking BB gun at a school employee. She thought she was going to die that day, she told police. “Do you know what a detective is?” police asked the sixth-grader in a chilly interrogation room. “A guy who looks for clues?” he replied. “You have the right to remain silent and to refuse to answer questions,” the detective went on. “Do you understand that? What does that mean?” “That means I don’t have to talk if I don’t want to?” he answered. The boy said he didn’t know his address, or even what state he lives in. He said he was cold and hungry. Guns at the ready More than half of the young people identified by the Sun Sentinel had access to guns or other serious weapons, typically in their own homes. The weapons most often belonged to their parents, grandparents, uncles and other family members. In a few cases involving young adults, the guns were their own. After Parkland, lawmakers in Florida raised the age to buy any gun from 18 to 21. Children of any age, however, can use guns while hunting or target shooting. Those under 16 must be supervised by an adult. In Orlando, police at the University of Central Florida arrested a 19-year-old who had a machine gun in his car. He had altered an AR-15 to make it a fully automatic rifle, using a kit he bought online. Florida law generally prohibits people from having a working machine gun. Police question a 19-year-old about whether he ever had urges or thoughts of hurting anyone. Authorities found a gun in his vehicle with a bump stock, which is a device to make the weapon fully automatic. Questioned by police, the university student “slowly began to psychologically unravel in front of investigators,” records say. He talked of Hitler, failing Calculus 2 and keeping his emotions pent up. On the petition for a court order banning him from having guns, police cited his fascination with weapons, thoughts of suicide, failing grades, lack of friends, anger issues, access to weapons and tactical training from the ROTC. Authorities also wrote that the teen considered himself an anarchist. In Polk County, a 16-year-old posted a selfie on Instagram wearing a black hoodie, gas mask and tactical vest. He was holding an AR-15 in a gloved hand, pointing it up to the ceiling like a terrorist. His face wasn’t visible. He bragged to classmates at his high school about having bombs at home and boasted “he was not afraid to shoot the school up,” according to a report written by the school resource officer. The teen had an arsenal at his disposal. To take the selfie, he told police, he took the key to his dad’s gun safe, while his dad was sleeping. The youth told a detective he also had his own gun safe in his bedroom, where he keeps a hunting rifle. His father surrendered 18 weapons to police, including an AR-15, the type of rifle used in the Parkland massacre. The boy’s mother later texted police claiming the father did not hand over all of his guns, hiding some under couch cushions and in walls, the police affidavit states. During a subsequent search, police found and seized additional ammunition in the home but no guns, according to a July 2018 judicial order summarizing a hearing on the matter.