PARKLAND, Fla. – Activists who attend or recently graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School kicked off their statewide summer tour Friday in Parkland.
The March For Our Lives event came the same day documents were released that detail a student's encounter with Nikolas Cruz just before the former student went on a shooting rampage Feb. 14, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others.
"I looked at a guy pulling a gun out of a bag," the freshman student told detectives in a recorded interview. "And there he is loading a gun."
The interview was conducted shortly after the Valentine's Day massacre.
"He told me, 'You better get out of here. Something bad is about to happen,'" the student told detectives. "And then he just -- he told me to run."
The documents also revealed how the ninth-grader alerted a member of the school's security staff about Cruz moments before he fired his first shot.
The teen identified the security staffer as Mr. Feis, who he said took him away from the freshmen building on a golf cart.
Authorities said Aaron Feis, who was also an assistant football coach at the Parkland school, was fatally shot by Cruz when he went to check out the student's claims.
Another member of the security staff, identified in the documents only as Coach DT, said he saw a "suspicious young man."
"I believe he made eye contact with me," he said to detectives.
The coach told authorities that he knew the suspicious man was Cruz and knew that he had been dismissed from the school.
But the coach said he lost sight of him and heard gunfire moments later.
"Then I immediately took cover inside a custodial closet," he said.
Many MSD students have dedicated their time after the shooting to fighting for stricter gun regulation laws.
Friday's launch party was at the Parkland Equestrian Center on Ranch Road.
The event featured food trucks, carnival games, arts and crafts, a raffle and more.
The student activists announced the schedule for their Road to Change tour at the event. Find a full schedule here.
