FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — The prosecutor and defense attorney for Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz agreed Tuesday that his 2018 attack that killed 17 people was horrible, but disagreed in their closing arguments on whether it was an act of evil worthy of execution or one of a broken person who should be imprisoned for life.
Melisa McNeill, the defense counterpart to Mike Satz, and Mike Satz, the lead prosecutor, presented for 12 jurors opposing pictures of Cruz’s attack on Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school on Valentine’s Day.
For Satz, Cruz was driven by antisocial personality disorder — in lay terms, he’s a sociopath. He deserves a death sentence because he “was hunting his victims” as he stalked a three-story classroom building for seven minutes. He fired his AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle into some victims at close range and returned to wounded victims as they lay helpless “to finish them off.”
Satz pointed to Cruz’s internet writings and videos, where he talked about his murderous desires such as when he wrote, “No mercy, no questions, double tap. I am going to kill a … ton of people and children.”
“It is said that what one writes and says is a window into their soul,” Satz said as the three-month trial neared its conclusion. The killings, he said, “were unrelentlessly heinous, atrocious and cruel.”
McNeill said neither Cruz nor herself has ever denied what he did and that “he knew right from wrong and he chose wrong.” But she said the former Stoneman Douglas student is “a broken, brain-damaged, mentally ill young man,” doomed from conception by the heavy drinking and drug use of his birth mother during pregnancy. McNeill argued for life imprisonment without parole and assured them that he would never be free.
“It’s the right thing to do. Mercy is what makes civilized. Giving mercy to Nikolas will say more about who you are than it will ever say about him,” McNeill told the jury.
Cruz, 24 years old, pleaded guilty to the murders of 14 students and three staff members in 2012 and to wounding 17 other people.
A jury can only decide his sentence. For death, a unanimous vote must be cast. Jurors may vote for death if the prosecution’s mitigating circumstances, such as the multiple deaths, the planning and his drinking, are more important than the defense’s. They can also vote to grant mercy to Cruz. On Wednesday, deliberations are set to start.
Cruz, wearing an off-white sweater and sitting impassively through the presentations, exchanging notes with his lawyers occasionally. A large number of the victims’ parents, wives and family members packed their section of the courtroom, many of them weeping during Satz’s presentation. The mother of a 14-year old girl who was murdered fled the courtroom, before she began to cry in the hallway. A few minutes prior, the families had welcomed each other with smiles and handshakes.
Satz carefully went through each murder, reminding jurors about how each victim died and how Cruz looked at them before shooting them multiple times.
“They all knew what was going on, what was going to happen,” Satz said.
He showed photographs and security footage of the shooting, just as he did during the trial. He spoke about the tragic death of a 14-year-old girl. Cruz shot her then returned to his guns and fired again at her chest.
“Right on the skin. She was shot four times and she died,” Satz said. He then noted a YouTube comment, which jurors saw during the trial, in which Cruz said: “I don’t mind shooting a girl in the chest.”
“That’s exactly what he did,” Satz said.
His voice breaking, Satz concluded his two-hour presentation by reciting the victims’ names, then saying that for their murders “the appropriate sentence for Nikolas Cruz is the death penalty.”
McNeill during her presentation acknowledged the horror Cruz inflicted and said jurors have every right to be angry, “but how many times have we made decisions based solely on anger and regretted it?”
She spoke out about her belief that Brenda Woodard his birth mother had heavily drank during pregnancy which left him with fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. She claimed that this is the reason for his strange, troubled, and sometimes violent behavior since he was 2.
“There is no time in our lives when we are more vulnerable to the will and the whims of another human being than when we are growing and developing in the wombs of our mothers,” McNeill said. Woodard “poisoned him in the womb. He was doomed in his womb.”
She claimed that Cruz’s increasingly unpredictable personality had left Lynda Cruz, his adoptive mother, overwhelmed. When he lost videogames, he pounded holes in walls, and he also destroyed furniture and killed pets. Visitors described the home as “a war zone,” McNeill said.
She pleaded for Cruz to be sentenced to life in prison and said that they should not be afraid of the reactions from the families or communities.
Gesturing toward the victims’ families, she said, “There is no punishment you could ever give Nikolas Cruz that would ever make him suffer as much as those people have and as much as they will continue to suffer every single day.”
“Sentencing Nikolas to death will not change that. It will not bring those 17 people back. Sentencing Nikolas to death will literally serve no purpose other than vengeance,” she said. Instead, she said, “Look into your heart. Look deep into your soul. It is not the most popular thing that you should do, but what is right.
Cruz’s mass shooting is the most fatal mass shooting ever to go to trial in the U.S. Nine others in the U.S. also shot at least 17 victims during or shortly after the attacks by suicide bombers or police gunfire. The trial of the suspect in the massacre of 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, is ongoing.
Report by Curt Anderson and Freida Frisaro of the Associated Press in St. Petersburg (Florida), Florida