A twisted California man who cyberstalked and harrassed families of victims of the Parkland school shooting in Florida has been sentenced to more than five years in prison, federal prosecutors said.
Brandon Michael Fleury, 22, will spend 66 months in a federal lockup after using 13 different Instagram accounts under the aliases of alleged Parkland gunman Nikolas Cruz and notorious serial killer Ted Bundy over the span of three weeks beginning in late December 2018, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida announced Monday.
Fleury sent messages taunting families about the deaths of their loved ones, often using a profile picture of Cruz — the former student who confessed to the February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The Parkland school shooting left 17 people dead and another 17 wounded, surpassing the 1999 Columbine High School massacre as the deadliest high school shooting in United States history.
Fleury, of Santa Ana, also threatened to kidnap relatives of the shooting victims among the 301 messages he sent, federal prosecutors said.
“I’m your abductor I’m kidnapping you fool,” Fleury wrote in one message dated Dec. 25, 2018.
In another message sent from an Instagram account with the username “the.douglas.shooter,” Fleury warned of more bloodshed.
“With the power of my AR-15, I take your loved ones away from you PERMANENTLY,” he wrote.
A search of Fleury’s computer tablets revealed thousand of images of Bundy, images of the targeted victims and screenshots of the disturbing messages he sent them, federal prosecutors said.
Fleury, who was arrested in January 2019, was convicted in October of interstate cyberstalking and interstate transmission of a threat to kidnap.
Fleury’s attorney, Sabrina Puglisi, told the New York Times she was disappointed that a judge did not place him in a residential treatment program since he has autism spectrum disorder. But Puglisi was pleased with the sentence since Fleury had faced up to 20 years, the newspaper reports.
“The judge made a strong argument that this type of trolling behavior on the internet is not OK, not acceptable and it won’t stand,” Puglisi told the newspaper. “He wanted to send a message to deter people from doing the same.”
Cruz, meanwhile, faces the death penalty if convicted in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre. His trial — which had been set to start in late January — has been delayed until sometime this summer at the earliest, the Miami Herald reported in December.
