Florida school shooting: Coventry teenager hid in cupboard

A teenager from Coventry who now goes to school in Florida said he was "terrified" as he was locked in a cupboard during a high school shooting.

Lewis Mizen is a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed on Wednesday.

The 17-year-old said he hid in a storage cupboard with about 20 students for two hours during the massacre.

Lewis said one of his close friends was killed during the attack. "It's a nightmare come to life," he said.

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Police said 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz set off a fire alarm at the school, which is about an hour north of Miami, so people would leave the classrooms and pour into the corridors, before he opened fire.

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"We thought it was a drill," Lewis said.

When school administrators started screaming "code red, get back in the building", Lewis and his classmates ran back to their classroom with their teacher where they "huddled under the desks" before moving into a storage cupboard.

"We didn't hear the bullets, but we heard the helicopters," he said. "We knew at that point it was something really serious."

The high school student said he and his classmates "were all on our phones" as they hid.

"I had people standing next to me watching CNN live trying to figure out what's going on," he said.

"It's one of those things you see on the news and think that will never happen to you, but it has.

"I have friends who have been killed, I have friends who have been shot. How can this be real?"

Mr Cruz has appeared in court charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder and has confessed to the shooting, police say.