When Tampa police, who periodically checked on the teen because of his troubled past, were tipped off that Cano was plotting to bomb the school that had kicked him out a year earlier, they thought the information was plausible enough that they knocked on his apartment door and his mother let them search the place.
Cano had amassed shrapnel, plastic tubing, timing and fuse devices to make pipe bombs, all for a plot in which he intended to cause more casualties than the Columbine High School massacre where 13 were killed before the two student attackers killed themselves, police said Wednesday.
Police and the school system "were probably able to thwart a potentially catastrophic event, the likes of which the city of Tampa has not seen, and hopefully never will," Police Chief Jane Castor said.
Before Tuesday's discovery, Cano had been arrested several times, most recently accused of breaking into a house and stealing a handgun, Tampa police said. He had a court-ordered curfew and was on a police watch list.
"We've been very, very familiar with him," police Maj. John Newman said.
Principal Chris Farkas and other administrators knew Cano, too. He'd been expelled in April 2010. Farkas said Tuesday that Cano likely would have been "red-flagged" as soon as he stepped on campus and probably would not have been able to pull off his plan.
Farkas said he is accustomed to all sorts of threats at a school of 2,100 on a large campus in the northern suburbs. Still, he was spooked about what might have been.
"My first response was shock," he said. "I wanted to see if it was a real threat."
"Once I found out and saw the information and saw what was taken from the apartment complex, that was when the reality and the fear set in that this was a real situation," he said.
The St. Petersburg Times reported that prosecutors at a hearing Wednesday said that when Cano was arrested he repeated his plan to detonate a bomb and cause mass casualties at Freedom, which opened in 2002 and was named to honor the victims of 9/11.
Cano tried to speak when he appeared before a judge but was quickly hushed by a public defender standing beside him.
"The plot wasn't..." Cano said, before the public defender stopped him and told the judge that "he has no comment," according to the Times.
Police told Farkas that Cano worked alone. Parents of every student got a recorded call informing them about Cano's arrest, said the principal of the high-performing school built to handle the overflowing northern suburbs in an area some locals refer to as New Tampa.
Authorities did not name the administrators targeted nor would they disclose who tipped them off.
After Cano was expelled from Freedom, he attended a charter school and left voluntarily in March, according to Hillsborough County schools spokeswoman Linda Cobbe. At that point he was 16 and could have chosen to drop out. He was not registered to attend classes this upcoming school year.
Cano faces felony charges of possessing bomb-making materials, cultivating marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, possessing of marijuana and threatening to throw, project, place or discharge a destructive device.
The Department of Children and Families said the agency investigated Cano's family in 2009. A spokesman gave no other details except to say DCF found no evidence of abuse or neglect.
Police said his mother let them search the apartment in a modest complex just a few miles from the school. The Tampa Tribune reported that Cano's great-grandfather Elliot Horning said that Cano's mother, Michelle, was divorced from his dad and worked as a math teacher at another Tampa high school. His mother was not at the apartment Wednesday.
Cano's Facebook page includes photos of him holding a machete and drinking from a bottle of malt liquor.
He lists two favorite quotes: "lessons not learned in blood are soon forgotten" and "dont trust anybody, cuz they all just wait for you to s--- a brick of gold so they can take it." He listed just 25 friends and no one that was out around the apartment complex seemed to know him.
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