‘Long road ahead’ for hero teen who took bullets to save classmates during Florida school shooting

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A 15-year-old hero has a “long road” to recovery after he put his body between the Florida shooter’s rampage and his classmates last week.

Anthony Borges, a soccer player at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, is being heralded as a hero after he was shot five times. Borges had reportedly been one of the last people to run into the classroom to hide from the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, and was trying to lock the door and block Cruz from getting to anyone else.

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“None of us knew what to do. So, he took the initiative to just save his other classmates,” his friend Carlos Rodriguez told ABC News.

Borges, who was the last of the injured shooting victims to be listed in critical condition, called his father to tell him that he had been shot.

Helping a hero

Anthony Borges’ condition has been updated to be fair rather than critical, but that doesn’t mean he is out of the woods.

The Broward County Sheriff’s office said that Borges was a “hero” and that Sheriff Scott Israel had been “honored” to visit him in the hospital, according to the New York Daily News. 

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“Fortunately, he is recovering — but has a long road ahead with more surgeries needed,” the office wrote on Facebook.

While Borges is still recovering, a GoFundMe page has been set up to help pay for his recovery. As of Sunday night, over $65,000 had been raised for the teen hero.

White supremacist violence

According to both the Associated Press and ABC News, Cruz was part of a group called the Republic of Florida, which wants to create a white-only state in Florida.

Jordan Jereb, the leader of the group, told the AP that Cruz “acted on his own behalf of what he just did and he’s solely responsible for what he just did.”

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Jereb also said that while Cruz was a part of the group, he did not know him personally.

The group describes itself as a “white civil rights organization fighting for white identitarian politics” and holds paramilitary drills, which Cruz attended in Tallahassee.