South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
After Parkland, one question remains: What is justice?
PARKLAND — Sometime after 1:30 a.m. in a hotel conference room, the law enforcement officer’s eyes — even before his words — told Tom and Gena Hoyer that their youngest child was gone, killed in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
They remember so little about the ride home. Almost as soon as they entered their Parkland house, Gena Hoyer walked upstairs into Luke’s second-floor room, untouched since the morning hours when he had been getting ready for school. She sat on the edge of his unmade bed next to the nightstand where he had left his prescription glasses. She was in Luke’s room at this hour because she believed that if she did not do this task right now, she might never.
Two thoughts entered her mind. One was clear but painful to contemplate: How could their family go on without Luke? The other was much less formed and so much harder to answer: What now? That question would crystallize over the months and years into something else: What does justice mean?
It’s been nearly 4½ years since an afternoon ambush at the high school on Valentine’s Day 2018 claimed Luke and 16 other students and faculty members.
What the Hoyers now know is that the concept of justice shape-shifts with the tides of mourning. It is both evasive and precise, and at times, uniquely unsatisfying. It has forced them to think deeply about society’s legal prescription for certain convicted murderers, and to consider what the fallout of yet another mass shooting means for school safety and gun laws.
They came to think of justice more broadly, not just as the punishment of an individual but as their own power to try to build something meaningful from the tragedy by making schools safer.
“Justice is complicated,” Gena Hoyer said. “I struggled with it.” What helped, she said, was viewing it as something that also exists “beyond the courtroom.”
Her husband put it this way: “We couldn’t allow ourselves to think of justice only in terms of this person being held accountable for what he did.”
Nikolas Cruz pleaded guilty in October 2021 to the murder or attempted murder of 34 people at the school in Parkland, but a jury still had to consider his sentence. Through week after week of jury selection, the concept of justice was what the Hoyers clung to in a 17th-floor courtroom in downtown Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as they sat a few feet away from the killer of their son. And it is what they hold on to now as the jury of seven men and five women considers whether the killer should be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole or be put to death.
On t he first day of the sentencing trial last week, the lead prosecutor, Michael J. Satz, described the violence that was unleashed upon the high school, naming the victims one by one and the number of times each had been shot. Videos taken inside classrooms were shown to jurors, and although the audience could not see the video images, everyone in the courtroom could hear the audio of booming gunfire, screams and pleas for help.
For the Hoyers, it was hard and overwhelming — and necessary. They believe learning the whole truth, and having the world learn it too, is part of winning justice for their son.
“I felt like I had to hear it, because it fills out the picture for me a little more,” Tom Hoyer said.
Each day in court, while painful, offers a fuller narrative of what happened, and a sense that every single second was critical.
“For such a long time, you are raising your kids, and that feels like your purpose,” Tom Hoyer said, his voice thinning to a whisper. “And then suddenly, one day, one of your purposes is gone. In that void, we really thought about how to go on and what justice meant to us. The truth is, I don’t know. I think, more than anything, I want fairness, if that makes sense.”
The sentencing trial is rare. In modern times, no American gunman who killed so many people in a single attack has survived to face trial until now.
Some of the Parkland families favor the death penalty. Others are against capital punishment and are prepared to accept a life sentence for the gunman. Still others have said they believed the killer deserved death but did not want to experience an emotionally brutal sentencing trial.
Just after the shooting, Gena Hoyer thought a life sentence was the right and simplest path. But within months of the shooting, as they learned more details, both the Hoyers became convinced that death was the appropriate punishment for the man who killed their son. They knew that a sentencing trial would mean weeks or months of their lives fully embedded in the courtroom.
It would mean revisiting the last horrific moments of