Parkland school shooter pleads guilty
He faces 17 counts of both murder and attempted murder
The former student who killed 17 people at a South Florida high school in 2018 pleaded guilty Wednesday to 17 counts each of murder and attempted murder, paving the way for a jury to decide whether to sentence him to death or life without parole.
Appearing in Broward County court in a mask and dark-colored shirt, Nikolas Cruz listened as Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer guided him through the charges and potential punishment for the massacre that killed 14 students and three faculty members.
“These are capital felonies, and they’re punishable one of two ways, either life in prison or the death penalty,” Scherer said. “Do you understand that you are facing a minimum, best-case scenario of life in prison?”
“Yes ma’am,” he responded.
Before accepting the plea, Scherer emphasized that Cruz’s decision would be irreversible, even if he ended up on death row. “You will not be able to change your mind,” she told him.
The judge then read the 34 charges and asked how he wished to plead. “Guilty,” Cruz said after each.
The plea by Cruz, 23, came more than 3½ years after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. His change of plea from not guilty was an abrupt reversal in the case. His attorneys had long acknowledged Cruz’s guilt but said he would formally plead guilty only if prosecutors agreed to let him be sentenced to life in prison. Prosecutors had refused, calling this the type of case that demanded the death penalty.
The rampage was one of the country’s deadliest school shootings, devastating the community and spurring a nationwide, student-led push for greater gun-control legislation.
Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was killed, said he was relieved that the case was finally moving toward a conclusion.
“There’s no closure, but we’re one step closer to having this nightmare of a legal process come to an end,” Guttenberg, who attended the hearing in person, said in an interview. “I am thankful that we have this one small step forward to justice and to him paying the ultimate penalty.”
Cruz spoke in the courtroom Wednesday morning, making his first public remarks about the massacre since he was arrested.
“I am very sorry for what I did,” he said during a brief, rambling statement. “I have to live with it every day . ... It brings me nightmares, and I can’t live with myself.” Cruz also said he wanted the victims and their relatives to decide his sentence.
Watching the hearing was painful, said Lori Alhadeff, whose daughter Alyssa Alhadeff, a 14-yearold freshman at Douglas, was killed in the attack.
Alhadeff said it was difficult to hear the attacker speak and to listen to prosecutors recounting in painful detail what happened Feb. 14, 2018.
“It was really challenging and traumatic,” said Alhadeff, who became a school safety proponent and was elected to the Broward school board after the massacre. “But I know it’s necessary in this process, for us to ultimately get to the penalty phase.”
Alhadeff said her family wants Cruz to receive the death penalty. She watched the hearing Wednesday on Zoom, along with other victims’ relatives, some of whom appeared visibly anguished during the proceedings.
“I’m lucky I was not there” in person, she said after it concluded. “It was very hard to control myself once I heard the shooter speak. I just got really enraged and upset.”
Cruz’s plea suggests that his attorneys made “a tactical decision” after looking at the facts and evaluating potential defenses, said George Brauchler, who led the prosecution of the gunman who killed 12 people inside an Aurora, Colo., movie theater in 2012.
The Aurora prosecution, like Parkland, marked an unusual case in which a mass killer survived to stand trial. Jurors in the Aurora case convicted the gunman in 2015 but said he should be sentenced to life in prison rather than death.
“The only potential out for a mass murderer is mental health,” Brauchler, a former district attorney, said in a telephone interview about the Parkland case.
Cruz’s defense team probably decided a mental health argument would not work for them, Brauchler said. With his guilty pleas, they are instead able to stand in front of the jury to say their client “did something evil” and owned that, hoping it might sway them to spare him a death sentence, Brauchler said.
Prosecutors during the penalty phase will outline what are called “aggravating factors” warranting a death sentence — such as whether he knowingly created a risk of death to many people. Defense attorneys, meanwhile, will offer “mitigating circumstances.” Under Florida law, one such circumstance is whether the defendant was influenced by “extreme mental or emotional disturbance.” Cruz had a history of mental health issues, and one of his attorneys previously called him “severely damaged and broken.”
The Parkland case will be one of the most highprofile death penalty trials in recent memory, and it comes as executions and death sentences continue to dwindle nationwide. In 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 279 death sentences were handed down and 98 executions carried out. By 2019, the center reported, those numbers had plunged to 34 death sentences and 22 executions.