Florida gunman’s testimony may seal his fate

Jury will likely determine this week if 24-year-old Parkland school shooter will be handed death sentence

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — It’s possible Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz talked himself into a death sentence.

Prosecutors played video last week at Cruz’s penalty trial of jailhouse interviews he did this year with two of their mental health experts. In frank and sometimes graphic detail, he answered their questions about his massacre of 17 people at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018 — his planning, his motivation, the shootings.

While it can’t be known what the 12 jurors are thinking, if any are wavering between voting for death or life without parole, his statements to Charles Scott, a forensic psychiatrist, and Robert Denney, a neuropsychologist, did not help his cause.

“All of this made Cruz himself perhaps one of the state’s best witnesses,” said David S. Weinstein, a Miami defense attorney and former prosecutor who has been monitoring the trial.

The jury will likely decide Cruz’s fate this week. For the 24-year-old to get a death sentence, the jury must be unanimous on at least one victim. But if all 17 counts come back with at least one vote in favor of life in prison, then that would be his sentence. Closing arguments are scheduled Tuesday, with deliberations beginning Wednesday.

Because Cruz’s defense is that his birth mother’s heavy drinking during pregnancy left him brain damaged, prosecutors could have experts examine him for their rebuttal case.

Scott and Denney interviewed him separately for several hours. In each, Cruz sat across the table, handcuffed, a sweater draped over his chest. He sometimes asked for a pen and paper to add diagrams and drawings to his explanations.

“The question is: ‘What will the jury take away from the interviews? Coldblooded killer who was vengeful and excited about the murders, or a person so hopelessly deranged that he can’t be anything but crazy?’ ” said Bob Jarvis, a professor at Nova Southeastern University’s law school.

In one of the interviews played for the jury, Cruz was asked what he did when he walked into the school.

“I walked through the gates. Hopefully, there would be no security guards, but I was wrong,” Cruz told Scott. “I was looking at the guy and he was watching me.”

When Cruz attended Stoneman Douglas, guards frequently checked him for weapons because of his erratic and sometimes violent behavior. When he was expelled a year before the shooting, a guard predicted he would eventually return and shoot people.

Fearing he’d been discovered, Cruz sprinted into a three-story classroom building and quickly assembled his weapon. He told a student who happened upon him to flee because something bad was about to happen.

He then went floor to floor, shooting down hallways and into classrooms, firing 140 shots in all.

“I think I showed mercy to three girls. I was going to walk away, but they showed nasty faces, and I went back,” Cruz said. “I thought they were going to attack me.”

Cruz shot several of his victims a second time after they fell, including his final one — a student writhing from a leg wound. He said the boy “gave me a nasty look. A look of anger.”