FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz’s chief prosecutor made his final push on Tuesday to convince jurors to sentence him to death. and carefully planned and deserving of execution.
Mike Satz said Cruz was “hunting for his victims” as he occupied a three-story classroom building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland for seven minutes, fired at some of the victims at close range and returned to some of the injured victims as they lay helpless. “to finish them off.”
He pointed to Cruz’s internet writings and videos where he spoke of his murderous desires, such as when he wrote, “No mercy, no questions, double tap. I’m 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 process neared its end. The killings, he said, “were relentlessly gruesome, abominable and cruel.”
Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty a year ago to murdering 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 Stoneman Douglas students to ever take the holiday. still to celebrate.
Cruz, dressed in an off-white sweater, sat unmoved during Satz’s presentation, occasionally exchanging notes with his lawyers. His lead attorney, Melisa McNeill, will make her closing statement later Tuesday. The deliberations are expected to begin on Wednesday.
A large number of parents, wives and relatives of the victims filled the part of the courtroom reserved for them, looking at Satz intently, many of them weeping. Just minutes before, they’d greeted each other with smiles, handshakes, and hugs.
The massacre is the deadliest mass shooting ever tried in the US. Nine other people in the US 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.
Satz kept his main point simple for the jury of seven men and five women. He focused on Cruz’s eight-month planning and attack, during which Cruz fired 140 shots from an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle, and his escape.
He played security videos of the shooting and showed gruesome crime scenes and autopsy photos. Teachers and students testified that they saw others die. He took the jury to the gated building, which is still bloodied and bullet-ridden. Parents and spouses gave tearful and angry statements.
McNeill and her team never questioned the horror he inflicted, instead focusing on their belief that his birth mother’s heavy drinking during pregnancy left him with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Their experts said his bizarre, disturbing and sometimes violent behavior from the age of 2 was misdiagnosed as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, meaning he never received proper treatment. That left his widowed adoptive mother overwhelmed, they said.
The defense cut their case, calling only about 25 of the 80 witnesses they said they would testify. They never mentioned Cruz’s high school days or mentioned his younger half-brother, Zachary, whom they accused of bullying.
In rebuttal, Satz and his team argued that Cruz had no fetal alcohol damage, but has antisocial personality disorder — in layman’s terms he is a sociopath. Their witnesses said Cruz feigned brain damage during testing and that he was able to control his actions, but chose not to. For example, they pointed to his job as a cashier at a discount store where he never had any disciplinary problems.
Prosecutors also played numerous videotapes of Cruz discussing the crime with their mental health experts, where he talked about his planning and motivation.
The defense used their cross-examination during the rebuttal trial to allege that Cruz was sexually assaulted and raped by a 12-year-old neighbor when he was 9.
