Testimony: School shooter witnessed dad’s death at age 5

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz’s attorneys presented more testimony Monday that the mass killer exhibited violent, disruptive and troubled behavior from his earliest years and, just before his sixth birthday, witnessed his adoptive father’s sudden death.

Finai Browd, a close friend of Cruz’s late adoptive mother Lynda, said she was told Roger Cruz had been in the family’s den with Nikolas and his younger brother Zachary when he came running and crying past the kitchen where his mother was making lunch.

Lynda Cruz asked her son if he was upset because his father had yelled at him.

“As clear as sunshine he said, ‘No, Daddy is dead,’ ” he replied, according to Browd. Lynda Cruz rushed into the den and found her husband had succumbed to a heart attack on the couch. Previous testimony showed that Nikolas Cruz did not get grief counseling until four years after the 2004 death.

Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October to murdering 14 students and three staff members at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018. A seven-man, fivewoman jury will decide whether he is sentenced to death or life without parole. For the former Stoneman Douglas student to received a death sentence, the jury must be unanimous.

Trying to overcome the emotional, gruesome and graphic evidence and testimony the prosecution presented over three weeks as it laid out the killings, the defense has spent the first five days of its case trying to show that from the time he was conceived in the womb of a crack-smoking, hard-drinking prostitute, he was put on a road that created a killer.

His public defenders played video recorded testimony of Browd, who has health issues that prevented her from coming to court.