Jury, in rare move, traces steps of killer in Parkland shooting
FORT LAUDERDALE — Roses that had been brought to honor love on that Valentine’s Day in 2018 lay withered, their dried and cracked petals scattered across classroom floors still smeared with the blood of victims gunned down by a former student more than four years earlier.
Bullet holes pocked walls and shards of glass from windows shattered by gunfire crunched eerily underfoot at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where shooter Nikolas Cruz murdered 14 students and three staff members. Nothing had been changed, except for the removal of the victims’ bodies and some personal items.
The 12 jurors and 10 alternates who will decide whether Cruz gets the death penalty or life in prison made a rare visit to the massacre scene Thursday, tracing Cruz’s steps through the three-story freshman building, known as “Building 12.” After they left, a group of journalists was allowed in for a much quicker first public view.
The sight was deeply unsettling: Large pools of dried blood still stained classroom floors. A lock of dark hair rested on the floor where one of the victims’ bodies once lay. A single black rubber shoe was in a hallway. Browned rose petals were strewn across a hallway where six people died.
In classroom after classroom, open notebooks displayed uncompleted lesson plans: A blood-coated book called “Tell Them We Remember” sat atop a bulletriddled desk in the classroom where teacher Ivy Schamis taught students about the Holocaust. Attached to a bulletin board in the room a sign read: “We will never forget.”
In the classroom of English teacher Dara Hass, where the most students were gunned down, students had written papers about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot by the Taliban for going to school and has since been a global advocate for educational access for women and girls.
One of the students wrote: “A bullet went straight to her head but not her brain.” Another read: “We go to school every day of the week and we take it all for granted. We cry and complain without knowing how lucky we are to be able to learn.”
The door of Room 1255, teacher Stacey Lippel’s classroom, was pushed open — like others to signify that Cruz shot into it. Hanging on a wall inside was a sign reading, “No Bully Zone.” The creative writing assignment for the day was written on the whiteboard: “How to write the perfect love letter.”
Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of firstdegree murder; the trial is only to determine if he is sentenced to death or life without parole.