Today is Friday, Feb. 14, the 45th day of 2025. There are 320 days left in the year. This is Valentine’s Day.
Today in history:
On Feb. 14, 2018, a gunman identified as a former student opened fire with a semi-automatic 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 sentenced in November 2022 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 melee following Cook’s attempt to kidnap Hawaiian monarch Kalaniʻōpuʻu, who was to be used as leverage for the return of 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.
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; 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.
Today’s birthdays:
- Businessman-politician Michael Bloomberg is 83.
- Saxophonist Maceo Parker is 82.
- Journalist Carl Bernstein is 81.
- Magician Teller (Penn and Teller) is 77.
- Journalist-radio host Terry Gross is 74.
- Actor Ken Wahl is 68.
- Opera singer Renée Fleming is 66.
- Actor Meg Tilly is 65.
- Football Hall of Famer Jim Kelly is 65.
- Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, is 58.
- Actor Simon Pegg is 55.
- Rock singer Rob Thomas (Matchbox Twenty) is 53.
- Former NFL quarterback Drew Bledsoe is 53.
- Actor Danai Gurira is 47.
- Actor Freddie Highmore is 33.