A 29-year-old man “obsessed” with school shooters has been accused of leaving dead animals at the Parkland memorial for the 17 people killed in the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the Broward Sheriff’s Office announced Friday morning.
Robert Zildjian Mondragon of Margate was arrested Aug. 4 and is being held without bond on charges of removing or disfiguring a tomb or monument (three counts), violation of probation for battery and indecent exposure (five counts) and violation of a risk protection order, the sheriff’s office said in a Friday news release.
The sheriff’s office investigation into the dead animals began in the summer, when a school crossing guard on July 20 found a dead duck with its chest cut open at a bench in the MSD Memorial Garden. The memorial garden is not on the high school’s campus and is at the corner of Pine Island and Holmberg Road.
On July 21, the crossing guard found a dead raccoon on the same bench. On July 31, a deputy found a dead opossum on the bench.
All of the dead animals were left by Mondragon, the sheriff’s office said.
Detectives have surveillance video that shows a man getting out of a white Nissan with “all black rims or tire with no hubcaps” outside of the memorial shortly after 11 p.m. on July 30. He went to the passenger side and then went into the memorial.
A day later, on July 31, a deputy saw a white Nissan Sentra with “illegal” tinted windows that matched the vehicle’s description driving slowly in the area of Pine Island Road and Holmberg Road at night. He stopped the car. Mondragon was the driver. The deputy saw “bird feathers and blood on the front passenger side floorboard,” according to the sheriff’s office.
Mondragon, according to the sheriff’s office, 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.”
While investigating the dead animals, detectives got search warrants for Mondragon’s car, home, cellphone and social media accounts. The sheriff’s office says it found a photo on Mondragon’s phone of him holding a dead duck with its chest cut open, and another photo on his phone of a dead raccoon on the floorboard of the passenger’s side of his vehicle.
Investigators also learned Mondragon has a “disturbing fascination” with school shooters, both real and fictional, according to the sheriff’s office.
“Mondragon’s facial tattoos resemble those of Tate Langdon, the character from the television series American Horror Story based on the Columbine High School massacre,” the sheriff’s office said.
Investigators also “found text messages about school shootings and internet searches about school shooters, how to break into steel doors, shootings involving multiple victims, pipe bombs, as well as slang terms for killing cops,” reads the news release. “Further concerning evidence revealed that two weeks before the end of the 2021/2022 school year, Mondragon walked the path the MSD school shooter took from the high school to Walmart on Feb. 14, 2018.”
