A “Hidden” Disability

Scores of professionals who interacted with Nikolas Cruz throughout his young life failed to suspect he had fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), a neurodevelopmental condition that directly influenced his thoughts and actions in the Parkland school shooting. In this chapter, we focus on factors that often contribute to the failure of diagnostic professionals to recognize or give sufficient weight to FASD, repetitive mistakes in Cruz that predated and postdated the shooting. Because we consider the failure to recognize and diagnose FASD to be symptomatic of a broader tendency to miss brain organicity when mental health professionals encounter cognitive, adaptive, and self-regulation impairments in their patients, we note FASD’s important similarities to intellectual disability, which is part of the reason we believe FASD merits consideration in the legal system with respect to culpability.