A man is facing multiple charges for placing dead animals on a memorial for the victims of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, the Broward Sheriff's Office said Friday.
An investigation into the suspect, 29-year-old Robert Mondragon, also revealed his disturbing fascination with mass school shootings, according to BSO detectives. Mondragon has face tattoos that detectives say resemble those of Tate Langdon, a fictional school shooter from the television series American Horror Story.
On July 20, BSO Threat Management Unit detectives said a school crossing guard discovered a dead duck with its chest cavity cut open on a bench at the MSD Memorial Garden, located outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on the corner of Pine Island and Holmberg.
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The following day, TMU says the crossing guard found a dead raccoon on the same bench. Ten days after that, a deputy found a dead opossum on the bench.
Surveillance video from July 30 showed a man, later identified as Mondragon, step out of a white Nissan shortly after 11 p.m. and enter the memorial for several minutes before getting back in the car and leaving.
The following evening, a BSO Parkland district deputy conducted a traffic stop when saw a white Nissan Sentra with an illegal window tint that matched the vehicle description from the surveillance video driving slowly in the area of Pine Island Road and Holmberg Road.
The deputy who conducted the stop says Mondragon was the only person in the car, and that he saw bird feathers and blood on the front passenger side floorboard.
BSO says Mondragon told the deputy he had the dead bird in his car because he likes “the metal and blood smell that emit from the dead animal.”
On the night of Aug. 4, Mondragon was arrested by BSO Violence Intervention Proactive Enforcement Response for allegedly violating his probation for battery and indecent exposure and for violating his risk protection order.
In a press conference, Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony said Mondragon is the "most severe individual" the TMU has been able to take off the streets since the unit's indoctrination.
TMU detectives continued their investigation regarding the dead animals left on the memorial and obtained various search warrants for Mondragon’s car, home, cellphone and social media accounts, BSO says.
Detectives say they found a photo on Mondragon’s cell phone of him holding a dead duck with its chest cavity cut open and another of a dead raccoon on the floorboard of the passenger’s side of his vehicle.
The investigation into Mondragon also revealed his disturbing fascination with school shooters.
"This individual had an alarming amount of inquiries on the internet," said Sheriff Gregory Tony. "[He was] looking at old active shooter events like Columbine, looking at ways and manners to develop pipebombs, looking at ways to kill officers, looking at the kill counts of victims from one shooting to another across this country."
BSO also says detectives discovered that two weeks before the end of the 2021/2022 school year, Mondragon walked the same path the confessed Parkland shooter took from the high school to Walmart on Feb. 14, 2018.
"We cannot afford to have this individual come back into society and hope that he doesn’t introduce violence, and hope that he doesn’t shoot up a school," said Sheriff Gregory Tony.
The sheriff predicts that if Mondragon is not kept off the streets, "he is going to execute an active shooter event in this community, and he is going to kill someone."
Mondragon is currently being held without bond on charges of removing or disfiguring a tomb or monument, violation of probation for battery and indecent exposure, and violation of a risk protection order.
