By Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale for The Associated Press
A jury spared Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz from the death penalty Thursday for killing 17 people at a Parkland high school in 2018, sending him to prison for the remainder of his life in a decision that left many families of the victims angered, baffled and in tears.
“This is insane. Everyone knows right? This is insane,” Chen Wang, cousin of shooting victim Peter Wang, said at a news conference after the jury’s decision was announced. “We need justice.”
The jury’s decision came after seven hours of deliberations over two days, ending a three-month trial that included graphic videos and photos from the massacre and its aftermath, heart-wrenching testimony from victims’ family members and a tour of the still blood-spattered building.
“We are beyond disappointed with the outcome today," Lori Alhadeff, whose daughter, Alyssa, was killed, said at the news conference.
“This should have been the death penalty, 100%. Seventeen people were brutally murdered on Feb. 14, 2018. I sent my daughter to school and she was shot eight times. I am so beyond disappointed and frustrated with this outcome. I cannot understand. I just don’t understand," she said.
Under Florida law, a death sentence requires a unanimous vote on at least one count. The jury found there were aggravating factors to warrant the death penalty for each victim, however, they also found mitigating factors. In the end, the jury could not agree that the aggravating factors outweighed the mitigating ones, so Cruz will get life without parole.
Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer will formally issue the life sentences on Nov. 1. Relatives, along with the students and teachers Cruz wounded, will be given the opportunity to speak.
Cruz, his hair unkempt, largely sat hunched over and stared at the table as the jury’s decisions were read. Rumblings grew from the family section — packed with about three dozen parents, spouses and other relatives of the victims — as it became apparent the jury was not going to recommend the death penalty. Many shook their heads, looked angry or covered their eyes as the judge spent 50 minutes reading the jury's decision for each victim. Some parents sobbed as they left court.
Jury foreman Benjamin Thomas, in an interview broadcast on local TV station WPLG, indicated that more than one juror voted for life in prison instead of the death penalty.
“We went through all the evidence and some of the jurors just felt that was the appropriate sentence," Thomas said. “I didn’t vote that way, so I’m not happy with how it worked out, but everyone has the right to decide for themselves.”
He said the jurors reached their decision Wednesday, then went home to sleep on it before bringing it to the judge on Thursday.
He said he feels bad for the families of victims and that “it hurt” to watch the decisions being read in court. “There’s nothing we could do. It’s the way the law is. And that’s how we voted,” he said.
“This has been really hard on my heart … I’d rather not see anything like this ever again.”
Tony Montalto, father of Gina Montalto, said: “How can the mitigating factors make this shooter, who they recognized committed this terrible act — acts, plural — shooting, some victims more than once on a pass, pressing the barrel of his weapon to my daughter’s chest — that doesn’t outweigh that poor little what’s-his-name had a tough upbringing?”
“Our justice system should have been used to punish this shooter to the fullest extent of the law," he said.
Montalto, president of Stand With Parkland, the group that represents most of the families and other relatives, also said the decision would do nothing to deter another person from gunning down multiple people in a school.
Michael Schulman, the stepfather of teacher Scott Beigel, said the decision gives anyone a license to kill, then claim mental illness as a defense. “This animal deserves to die. He hunted all of these people,” Schulman said. “He planned it for months.”
As he spoke to the media, Schulman held up a laptop with an image of Cruz in the school hallway with a gun. “The last thing my son saw was the gunman aiming at him,” he said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said it “stings” that Cruz will not receive the death penalty.
In a case like this, "where you’re massacring those students with premeditation in utter disregard for basic humanity ... I just don’t think anything else is appropriate except a capital sentence,” DeSantis said.
Multiple family members called Cruz a “monster” and talked about the years they waited for justice. They thanked prosecutors for their work, but in the end, they said, they got another blow.
Just days after the shooting, Cruz's defence had offered that he plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. But then-Broward State Attorney Mike Satz rejected that.
Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor released a statement Thursday saying: “We have not shied away from telling all of the horror, all of the loss, all of the devastation, all of the pain, all of the facts, all of the truth. We hope that, while there is no such thing as closure, this will bring some measure of finality and justice to this terrible chapter.”
Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty a year ago to murdering 14 students and three staff members and wounding 17 others on Feb. 14, 2018. Cruz said he chose Valentine’s Day to make it impossible for Stoneman Douglas students to celebrate the holiday ever again.
The massacre is the deadliest mass shooting that has ever gone to trial in the U.S. Nine other people in the U.S. who fatally shot at least 17 people died during or immediately after their attacks by suicide or police gunfire. The suspect in the 2019 massacre of 23 at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart is awaiting trial.
Lead prosecutor Mike Satz kept his case simple for the seven-man, five-woman jury. He focused on Cruz’s eight months of planning, the seven minutes he stalked the halls 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 gruesome crime scene and autopsy photos. Teachers and students testified about watching others die. He took the jury to the fenced-off building, which remains blood-stained and bullet-pocked.
Cruz’s lead attorney Melisa McNeill and her team never questioned the horror he inflicted, but focused on their belief that his birth mother’s heavy drinking during pregnancy left him with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Their experts said his bizarre, troubling and sometimes violent behaviour starting at age 2 was misdiagnosed as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, meaning he never got the proper treatment. That left his widowed adoptive mother overwhelmed, they said.
The defence cut its case short, calling only about 25 of the 80 witnesses they said would testify. They never brought up Cruz’s high school years or called his younger half-brother, Zachary, whom they accused of bullying.
In rebuttal, Satz and his team contended that Cruz did not suffer from fetal alcohol damage but has antisocial personality disorder.
Their witnesses said Cruz faked brain damage during testing and that he was capable of controlling his actions, but chose not to. For example, they pointed to his employment as a cashier at a discount store where he never had any disciplinary issues.
Prosecutors also played numerous video recordings of Cruz discussing the crime with their mental health experts where he talked about his planning and motivation.
The defence alleged on cross-examination that Cruz was sexually molested and raped by a 12-year-old neighbour when he was 9.
Banner image: Assistant public defender Melisa McNeill, seated with Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter Nikolas Cruz touches her hands to her head as the last of the 17 verdicts were read in the penalty phase of Cruz's trial at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Thursday, Oct. 13, 2022. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP, Pool)
