Prosecutor makes final case for execution of Cruz
FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. >> The lead prosecutor of Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz made his final push Tuesday to persuade jurors to sentence him to death, telling them during his closing argument that the 2018 attack that killed 17 people was cold, calculated, meticulously planned and deserving of execution.
Mike Satz said Cruz “was hunting his victims” as he stalked a three-story classroom building at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for seven minutes, firing his AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle into some victims at close range and returning to wounded victims as they lay helpless “to finish them off.”
He pointed to Cruz’s internet writings and videos, where he talked about his murderous desires, such as when he wrote, “No mercy, no questions, double tap. I am going to kill a ... ton of people and children.”
“It is said that what one writes and says is a window into their soul,” Satz said as the three-month trial neared its conclusion. The killings, he said, “were unrelentlessly heinous, atrocious and cruel.”
Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty a year ago to murdering 14 students and three staff members and wounding 17
others on Feb. 14, 2018. Cruz said he chose Valentine’s Day to make it impossible for Stoneman Douglas students to celebrate the holiday ever again.
The jury will only decide whether he is sentenced to death or life without parole. A unanimous vote is required for a death sentence.
Cruz, dressed in an offwhite sweater, sat impassively during Satz’s presentation, occasionally exchanging notes with his attorneys. His lead attorney, Melisa McNeill, was to
give her closing argument later Tuesday. Deliberations are expected to begin today.
Loved ones attend
A large number of the victims’ parents, wives and family members packed the section of the courtroom reserved for them, watching Satz intently, many of them weeping. The mother of a murdered 14-year-old girl fled the courtroom during Satz’s presentation before bursting into loud sobs in the hallway.
Minutes earlier, the families
had greeted each other with smiles, handshakes and hugs.
Satz, who served as Broward County state attorney for 44 years before stepping down early last year, meticulously went through the murders, reminding the jurors in order of how the victims were slain and how Cruz looked some in the eye before he shot them multiple times.
“They all knew what was going on, what was going to happen,” Satz said.
He talked about the death of one 14-year-old girl. Cruz shot her, then went back to shoot her again, putting his gun against her chest.
“Right on her skin. She was shot four times and she died,” Satz said.
He then noted a YouTube video, which jurors saw during the trial, in which Cruz said, “I don’t mind shooting a girl in the chest.”
“That’s exactly what he did,” Satz said.
His voice breaking, he concluded his two-hour presentation by reciting the names of the 17 victims, then saying that for their murders “the appropriate sentence for Nikolas Cruz is the death penalty.”
The massacre is the deadliest mass shooting that has ever gone to trial in the U.S. Nine other people in the U.S. who fatally shot at least 17 people died during or immediately after their attacks by suicide or police gunfire. The suspect in the 2019 massacre of 23 at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart is awaiting trial.
Satz kept his main case simple for the seven-man, five-woman jury. He focused on Cruz’s eight months of planning and the attack, where Cruz fired 140 shots, and his escape.
He played security videos of the shooting and showed gruesome crime scene and autopsy photos. Teachers and students testified about watching others die. He took the jury to the fenced-off building, which remains blood-stained and bullet-pocked. Parents and spouses gave tearful and angry statements.
The defense
McNeill and her team never questioned the horror Cruz inflicted, but focused on their belief that heavy drinking by his birth mother, Brenda Woodard, during pregnancy left him with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Their experts said his bizarre, troubling and sometimes violent behavior starting at age 2 was misdiagnosed as attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder, meaning he never got the proper treatment. That left his widowed adoptive mother, Lynda Cruz, overwhelmed, they said.
Satz challenged those assertions, saying in his argument that medical records do not support the allegation Woodard drank during pregnancy. He said records do show that Lynda Cruz took her son to numerous psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists throughout childhood.
The defense cut their case short, calling only about 25 of the 80 witnesses they said would testify. They never brought up Cruz’s high-school years or called his younger halfbrother, Zachary, whom they accused of bullying.