Cruz brothers share bitter, angry history
In a photograph from their childhood, Nikolas and Zachary Cruz sit arm in arm, grinning like the best of buddies. But their relationship was much more tormented.
The fracture between Nikolas Cruz and his younger brother haunted the school killer, according to records and family friends. By all accounts, it was an impor-
tant element of his twisted psyche. Nikolas Cruz was unable to cope with the brotherly strife that an average boy might have shrugged off.
The split was so deep that in middle school, Nikolas Cruz slept with scissors and knives, apparently fearful of his brother, their adoptive mother told a psychiatrist. Until she died in November, his mother was his closest friend, siding with him as he warred with his brother and the world around him.
Since Nikolas Cruz confessed to murdering 17 people and injuring 17 others on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, he and his onetime adversary seem to be in an even darker orbit than the one that marked their younger years.
Zachary Cruz has been arrested for skateboarding at his brother’s crime scene, and sat in an isolated cell in the same jail. Police keep track of him with an ankle monitor the court ordered him to wear. He’s been confined twice under the Baker Act, which allows authorities to involuntarily hospitalize a person for a psychological evaluation.
Despite the brothers’ rocky history, Zachary Cruz visits his brother in jail, and attends his court hearings.
Stark turnabout
“Zachary Cruz is the only person in the world that Nikolas Cruz has left to speak to,” the younger brother’s attorney, Joseph Kimok, said in court papers.
The turnabout is stark. One family friend told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that Zachary Cruz — who grew larger and stronger than Nikolas — teased and tormented him before the shooting.
“He created all kinds of havoc in the house,” former neighbor Paul Gold said of Zachary Cruz. “He was his brother’s biggest bully.”
Zachary Cruz himself told deputies he and his friends mistreated Nikolas Cruz, and now he wished they’d been “nicer.”
A recent posting by Zachary Cruz on Instagram underscores the complicated relationship between the brothers. It seems to have a wistful lilt as it starts, but it ends with the family violence noted in a stack of police and mental health reports from over the years.
“Yeah nick i still can’t believe this s...” Zachary Cruz wrote on Instagram last week. “Feels like yesterday I was yelling at you to close the door when you s .... now you sit behind them bricks. i swear i wanna quit. remember when we was jits, still got that scar on my head from when you had a fit... tears running down my face but i swear i hear mom telling me not to quit... you my brother we even share the same biological mother. yeah we even had the local po po going loco. remember during hurricane irma we ran around the community pool like some damn fools. #snippet #mightwriteabook”
In a live Instagram video recently, he answered questions posed by the scores of followers who have flocked to him. Like his brother, he has attracted a fold of new “friends” — strangers who profess to love him and tune in to watch him eat a Hot Pocket.
“Are you and Nikolas very different?” he read aloud, then answered: “No. We have a lot of similarities that nobody knows about.”
Both boys have emotional and behavioral problems, records say. Both were treated with mental health counseling, and medication. Neither earned a driver’s license, or a high school diploma.
A brother’s rejection
But there are differences, too.
Zachary Cruz’s Instagram account, zachtheskaterkid, features video clips from local skate parks. His brother’s account carried images of bullets, a bloody frog, guns and a target and described him as “nikolas annihilator.”
Zachary Cruz was the more popular brother, able to make friends — something Nikolas agonized over not being able to do.
“He has no friends in the neighborhood and feels rejected by peers in school,” a child psychiatrist noted in a 2014 school evaluation of Nikolas Cruz obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
His brother’s rejection stabbed at him.
A longtime former family friend who didn’t want her name published said Zachary’s friends didn’t want Nikolas around. The older Cruz boy threw temper tantrums if things didn’t go his way, Their mother forced Zachary to allow his brother to tag along.
“You can’t go unless you take Nikolas,” the friend recalled Lynda Cruz telling Zachary.
When she baby-sat the boys, she said Nikolas would stand at the window. When she asked what he was doing, he’d say, “Waiting for my mother.”
Gold, another friend and former neighbor, said Zachary Cruz resented his brother because “his mother paid more attention to Nikolas.”
It was obvious, the longtime family friend said: “Whenever anything happened, she would automatically say, ‘What did Zachary do now?’”
Roger and Lynda Cruz adopted the boys late in life, forming a nuclear family in their new Parkland home in Pine Tree Estates.
When Nikolas was born in September 1998, Roger was 61, and Lynda was one day shy of 49. The following spring, his birth mother was pregnant again. Zachary arrived in February 2000, while she was incarcerated in Ocala, the family friend said.
Roger died of a heart attack in 2004 when the boys were very young.
At wit’s end
Lynda Cruz had a difficult time raising them without him, and the family’s seemingly idyllic suburban existence quickly turned chaotic.
“It was beyond her capabilities to take care of those boys,” said Gold, who was a neighbor in 2009 and 2010. “I talked to her that she needed to find a boyfriend, someone to help her take care of the boys. She loved Roger like there was no tomorrow. I think at the end she wanted to die and join him.”
Both sons were diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, public records say. Nikolas Cruz was labeled in some records as having autism, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Zachary Cruz was described as having oppositional defiant disorder.
When Lynda Cruz was at wit’s end, she’d pick up the phone and dial 911.
One particularly rough year, 2012, Lynda Cruz reached for help from the Broward Sheriff’s Office at least eight times.
In one call, she complained the boys were “out of control” and “destroying [the] home.”
In another, Lynda Cruz asked deputies to “talk to [Zachary] about his behavior” because he was “extremely defiant,” “rude and always runs away from home.”
Still another that year came when 12-year-old Zachary and 14-year-old Nikolas “left out their bedroom window and climbed over the fence. … Both didn’t take their meds,” the dispatcher’s report reads. Lynda Cruz was 63 at the time.
With no father figure in the home, Lynda Cruz reached out to others. Gold said after he moved to West Palm Beach, he hosted the boys and delivered a “good pep talk on values.”
In November, Lynda Cruz caught pneumonia and died. She was 68. Gold said Nikolas Cruz blamed cigarette and alcohol companies because his mother smoked and was a wine drinker.
“I spoke to Nik extensively about it,” Gold said. “He was very angry about his mother’s death.”
‘Sins’ of his brother
The boys moved in with Rocxanne Deschamps, a family friend who had lived with Gold in Parkland. Their environment swiftly shifted from the coiffed lawns of Parkland to a modest mobile home community, Lantana Cascades.
Nikolas Cruz was kicked out in a matter of weeks. Zachary Cruz still resides there.
A former senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, he hasn’t been in school since his mother died.
On March 19, he took his skateboard to the high school in Parkland where his brother shot and killed students and educators he’d once attended school with. Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies stopped the 18-year-old.
The police body cam video shows Zachary Cruz casually explaining to deputies, “I’ll be straight up, I just wanted to take it all in.”
He was arrested for trespassing and jailed. Authorities said they’d already told Cruz to stay away from the school, in a community where the pain was raw.
Zachary Cruz didn’t respond to repeated inquiries for this story. His attorney, Kimok, also declined to comment.
In court papers, Kimok said his client is being punished “for the sins of [Nikolas].” Zachary Cruz’s bond on the trespassing charge was originally set at $500,000, and prosecutors alleged that “all the same flags” are present in Zachary Cruz as his murderous halfsibling.
Unlike his brother, though, Zachary Cruz hasn’t hurt anyone and doesn’t have a weapon. He “did not bring any of this upon himself.”
“Zachary Cruz did not kill 17 people on a high school campus,” hi Kimok argued. “He should not be treated like he did.”
His brother’s shooting spree left Zachary Cruz remorseful, despondent, and second-guessing their troubled history.
Zachary told a detective that the night of the shooting, he was in the car with Deschamps and told her: “I don’t want to be alive; I don’t want to deal with this stuff.” The next night, he felt as if “someone was trying to get me” and was upset with the media. He “was scared as he thought he had heard people outside.”
“Bro,” he said in a recent Instagram video, “my address is all over the news, bro. That’s why I don’t sleep, bro. I be paranoid. That’s why I stay up so late. I don’t even go asleep until I see the sun.”
The detective concluded that Zachary “has no thoughts of wanting to harm and/or kill anyone.”
One recent afternoon, Zachary videotaped himself for his Instagram audience sifting through a pile of photographs, holding up pictures of himself and his brother as little boys in the bathtub, and on a bike ride.
Another afternoon, Zachary Cruz read from their comments on the screen: “A happy childhood memory?”
“I have a lot of those,” he answered, “but I don’t want to share any of them yet.” He paused for a long time and looked away. “Just ’cuz.”