On Feb. 14, 2018, a former student opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years earlier. (Nikolas Cruz pleaded guilty to murder in October 2021 and was later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)
Also on this date:
In 1779, English explorer James Cook was killed on the island of Hawai’i during a confrontation after Cook’s attempt to kidnap Hawaiian monarch Kalaniʻōpuʻu as leverage to recover a boat stolen from one of Cook’s ships.
In 1876, inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled Bell the rightful inventor.)
In 1929, the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang were gunned down.
In 1984, 6-year-old Stormie Jones became the world’s first heart-liver transplant recipient when the surgery was performed at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The girl died in 1990 at age 13.
In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” a novel the ayatollah condemned as blasphemous against Islam.
In 2013, double-amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, at his home in Pretoria, South Africa, saying he mistook her for an intruder; he was later convicted of murder and served nearly nine years of a sentence of 13 years and five months before being released from prison in January 2024.
In 2017, a former store clerk, Pedro Hernandez, was convicted in New York of murder in one of the nation’s most haunting missing-child cases, nearly 38 years after 6-year-old Etan Patz (AY’-tahn payts) disappeared while on the way to a school bus stop.
In 2023, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that more than 35,000 people died in Turkey as a result of an earthquake on Feb. 6, making it the deadliest such disaster since the country’s founding 100 years earlier. (The combined death toll in Turkey and neighboring Syria would surpass 50,000 people).
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