FORT LAUDERDALE — Four years after a former student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed 17 people, a jury and judge will decide if Nikolas Cruz should be put to death.
The jury selection process begins Monday in the sentencing trial for Cross, who faces the death penalty after pleading guilty to 17 counts of first-degree murder in October.
Jurors must come to an unanimous decision if they choose to recommend executing Cruz. Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer will have the final say, a ruling she may not make until fall.
Jury selection is expected to take weeks because of the publicity the killings received, and the penalty trial is expected to last at least four months. It was originally scheduled to start in 2020 but was delayed numerous times during the coronavirus pandemic.
After hearing the arguments for each side, jurors must vote unanimously for death for Cruz to be executed. According to Florida law, if even one juror votes otherwise, the convicted individual will receive a mandatory life sentence.
After the jury’s recommendation, the judge then goes through the evidence and testimony and hears any additional arguments before imposing a sentence.
Florida is one of 28 states – including Texas, Louisiana and Georgia – that still have a death penalty, according to the national nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. Three of those states – California, Oregon and Pennsylvania – have governor-imposed moratoriums, meaning no executions are going on.
17 lives lost in less than 7 minutes
Cruz, now 23, took an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle through the halls of the school on Feb. 14, 2018, killing 14 students and three staff members during a seven-minute rampage through a three-story building on the Parkland campus, about 15 miles southwest of Boca Raton. I have wounded 17 others. He had been a student at the high school before being expelled 13 months before.
After the shooting, Cruz walked to a Walmart immediately west of campus and ordered a drink at the Subway sandwich shop, before he left and stopped at a McDonald’s.
A police officer arrested Cruz at 3:37 pm, two miles southwest of campus. A witness identified Cruz after an officer had him in handcuffs.
On the day of the massacre, Cruz, then 19, took an Uber to the school from a nearby home where he was living. He stored the AR-15 in a bag that made it look like a musical instrument, and told the driver he was headed for music class. He passed by at least two unarmed security guards and a student before he started shooting at 2:21 pm
Cruz roamed the hallways of the first floor of Building 12, the primary building for freshmen on the north side of campus. He shot students in the hallways and through the window of classrooms with the AR-15.
Why the sentencing will resemble a trial
Evidence that would have been shown to the court had Cruz undergone a criminal trial will be shown during the penalty phase, which is expected to take months because of the severity of the crime and the number of victims.
Jury selection is expected to take weeks and end with 20 jurors, eight of them being alternates. Throughout April, lawyers will spend Monday through Wednesday selecting possible jurors and Thursday and Friday for hearings related to evidence.
Finding jurors in Broward County who do not have strong emotions about the case is one problem the court will face in trying to seat a jury.
Richard Lubin, a Palm Beach County attorney who has handled high-profile cases before but is not involved with the Cruz case, said the notoriety of the case will make choosing a fair jury difficult.
“It is impossible on a case like this to get a fair and impartial jury,” he said. “But, they’ll get through enough jurors who will say ‘I will be objective, I will follow the law.'”
As the jury selection for Cruz’s sentencing trial begins, the proceeding marks the first time the gunman in a mass school shooting will have a trial.
Cruz’ penalty trial is rare because many school shooters take their own life during or after the shooting.
“I am very sorry for what I did. And I have to live with it every day. And that if I were to get a second chance, I will do everything in my power to try to help others,” Cruz said after pleading guilty in October, one of the only times he spoke in the courtroom.
In order for a person to be sent to death row, the jury weighs aggravating and mitigating factors. They must find at least one aggravating factor to be proven, and it must outweigh the mitigating ones.
Aggravating factors can include the heinous, cruel, or depraved manner of the crime and substantial planning and premeditation to cause death, among others.
Mitigating factors that the defense will likely argue include Cruz committing the offense under severe mental or emotional disturbance.
The state has listed more than 1,000 witnesses but said it is unlikely all of them will testify. The defense also listed witnesses, many of them mental health experts who have analyzed Cruz, whose mental health is likely to be at the center of the trial.
‘A broken child,’ ‘a professional school shooter’
Cruz’s massacre followed a troubled childhood and adolescence.
He was born Sept. 24, 1998, to a woman with a history of drug use. When she was five months pregnant with him, she was arrested for buying crack cocaine.
A Parkland couple adopted Cruz at birth. His adoptive father of him died of a heart attack when Cruz was 5. Cruz saw it happen and alerted his adoptive mother of her.
Doctors diagnosed Cruz with several disorders and conditions while he was a child: depression, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, emotional behavioral disability and autism, records from the state Department of Children and Families show. His adoptive mother, Lynda Cruz, also told Broward sheriff’s deputies he had obsessive-compulsive disorder and anger issues.
Since preschool, Cruz had a history of threatening, frightening, unusual and sometimes violent behavior, according to court records. He had counselors in school and at home and he took medications, DCF records show. At school, he was bullied and struggled to make friends, according to reports.
Over 10 years, Broward deputies responded to 23 calls to Cruz’s home. When he was 14, his mother reported that he had hit her with a vacuum cleaner hose. A few months later, she told deputies he had thrown her against the wall when she took away his Xbox gaming system from her. A year later, she told deputies he had punched a wall when she took away the Xbox again.
School records show he left public school in eighth grade for a school that offers a program for students with emotional and behavioral disabilities. Along the way, he’d become fascinated with guns and death. Yet he has gained admission to Marjory Stoneman Douglas, home to about 3,300 students.
I have faced issues there almost immediately. Within the first month of classes, he threatened to shoot up the school on social media.
In 10th grade, I joined JROTC, where I took part in marksmanship, or precision shooting. In about September 2016, just before his 18th birthday, Cruz reportedly made two attempts to take his own life, according to DCF records.
In January 2017, I assaulted someone at Stoneman Douglas, leading to his expulsion. He transferred to an alternative school in February, the same month he bought the AR-15 he used at the school a year later from a gun shop.
In September, the FBI was warned about an eerie comment on a YouTube channel from a user named Nikolas Cruz: “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”
Then, in November 2017, Lynda Cruz died of pneumonia. She was 68, and Cruz was lost without her, those who knew him said.
“He is a broken human being. He is a broken child,” assistant public defender Melisa McNeill said in the days after the shooting. Others described him as mentally ill and traumatized.
Nikolas and his younger brother Zachary Cruz went to live with a former neighbor, Rocxanne Deschamps. She soon kicked Nikolas out after a violent tantrum.
Around Thanksgiving, James and Kimberly Snead, whose son was a fellow Stoneman Douglas student, took Cruz into their home and gave him his own room. They saw him as a lonely teenager who did not know how to complete household chores. They let him keep guns in their home, something Deschamps would not allow.
On the morning of the shooting, Cruz told them he didn’t need a ride to school. “It’s Valentine’s Day, and I don’t go to school on Valentine’s Day,” he said.
From their home he took the Uber ride to Parkland.
Follow Gerard Albert on Twitter: @Gerard_Albert3
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism