Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz will be sentenced to life in prison without parole for the 2018 killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, after a jury said Thursday it could not unanimously agree to be executed.
The decision came Thursday after a three-month trial that included graphic videos, photos and testimonies of the massacre and its aftermath, heartbreaking testimony from victims’ relatives and a tour of the building still spattered with blood.
Under Florida law, a death sentence requires a unanimous vote in at least one case. Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer will formally issue the sentence on November 1.
“We are beyond disappointed in today’s outcome,” Lori Alhadeff, whose daughter Alyssa was killed, said at a news conference after the jury’s decision was announced.
“This should have been the death penalty, 100 percent. Seventeen people were brutally murdered on February 14, 2018. I sent my daughter to school and she was shot eight times. I’m very disappointed and frustrated with this result. I don’t get it, I just don’t get it.”
Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty a year ago to killing 14 students and three staff members and injuring 17 others on Feb. 14, 2018. Cruz said he chose Valentine’s Day to make it impossible for the students of Stoneman Douglas would never celebrate again.
Cruz, with unkempt hair, sat mostly hunched over and stared at the table as the jury’s recommendations were read. Rumors grew from the family section, filled with about three dozen parents, spouses and other relatives of the victims, as life sentences were announced. Many shook their heads, looked angry or covered their eyes.
Lead prosecutor Mike Satz kept his case simple for the jury of seven men and five women. It focused on Cruz’s eight months of planning, the seven minutes he stalked the hallways of a three-story classroom building, firing 140 shots with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, and his escape.
He played security videos of the shooting and showed the gruesome crime scene and autopsy photos. Teachers and students testified that they saw others die. He led the jury into the locked building, which remains bloodstained and bullet-riddled. Parents and spouses gave tearful and angry statements.
Problem behavior started at age 2
Cruz’s lead attorney, Melisa McNeill, and her team focused on his belief that his birth mother’s drinking during pregnancy left him with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. His experts said his strange, troubling and sometimes violent behavior from the age of two was misdiagnosed as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, meaning he never received the right treatment.
That left his widowed adoptive mother Lynda overwhelmed, they said. He died just months before the mass shooting.
Linda Beigel Schulman, Michael Schulman, Patricia Padauy Oliver and Fred Guttenberg, relatives of some of the victims, hug in the courtroom as they await the verdict Thursday. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun Sentinel/Reuters)
In rebuttal, Satz and his team claimed that Cruz did not suffer from fetal alcohol damage, but instead has an antisocial personality disorder. His witnesses said Cruz faked brain damage during the tests and was capable of controlling his actions, but chose not to. For example, they pointed to his job as a cashier at a discount store where he never had a disciplinary problem.
Prosecutors also played numerous video recordings of Cruz discussing the crime with his mental health experts in which he discussed his planning and motivation.
The defense alleged on cross-examination that Cruz was sexually abused and raped by a 12-year-old neighbor when she was 9 years old.
The jury found that there were aggravating factors for each victim. However, they also found mitigating factors. And the jury could not agree that the aggravating factors that would have warranted the death penalty outweighed the mitigating factors.
Tony Montalto, father of Gina Montalto, said: “How can the mitigating factors that this shooter, who they recognized, committed this terrible act – acts, plural – shoot, some victims more than once in one pass, pressing the barrel of his gun through my daughter’s breast, doesn’t that beat that poor man as you say he had a hard upbringing?
“Our justice system should have been used to punish this shooter to the fullest extent of the law.”
The ex-officer awaits trial for the actions of that day
Several students attending Stoneman Douglas at the time of the mass shooting became politically active as a result of their experience, helping to organize national March for Our Lives demonstrations.
The mass shooting has also led to local downfalls. Broward County Deputy Scot Peterson, who was assigned to the campus that day, was fired for neglect of duty and is awaiting trial on child neglect charges.
Patricia Oliver, left, mother of Joaquin Oliver, one of the victims of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, listens as Manuel Oliver, center, Joaquin’s father, speaks during the second March for our lifes. rally in support of gun control on June 11, in Washington, DC, Parkland survivor and activist David Hogg listens, right. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/The Associated Press)
In August, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis fired four Broward County school board members on Friday, a week after a grand jury convened to investigate the 2018 school massacre indicted them and administrators of the district of “cheating, embezzlement, embezzlement, neglect of duty and incompetence.” ” in its management of a campus safety program.
School board races in Florida are nonpartisan, but the four unseated are all Democrats. DeSantis, a Republican, replaced them with members of his own party.
Other board members unaffected by this change now include Alhadeff and Debra Hixon, whose husband, Chris, was killed in the Stoneman Douglas shooting. They were elected to the board after running on platforms promoting better campus safety.
The federal gun law passed this summer
Then-President Donald Trump met with several students and their families at the White House after the shooting, promising meaningful gun reform, but efforts from the White House and Congress failed, with Trump soon appearing at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention and vowed to champion broad gun ownership rights.
After another wave of mass shootings this spring, including the massacre of 19 students and two teachers at a Texas elementary school, President Joe Biden in June signed the most important gun violence bill in decades.
The legislation would tighten background checks for younger gun buyers, keep firearms from more domestic violence offenders and help states establish red flag laws that make it easier for authorities to take guns from people deemed dangerous. Most of its $13 billion cost in the US will help strengthen mental health programs and help schools.
While the new gun law does not include tougher restrictions long championed by Democrats, such as a ban on assault-style weapons and background checks for all firearms transactions , is the most shocking measure of gun violence produced by Congress since the enactment of a long-expired assault. gun ban in 1993.