He then noted a YouTube comment, which jurors saw during the trial, in which Cruz said: “I don’t mind shooting a girl in the chest.” She was shot four times and she died,” Satz said. Cruz shot her and then went back to shoot her again, putting his gun against her chest.
He talked about the death of one 14-year-old girl. “They all knew what was going on, what was going to happen,” Satz said.Īs he had during the trial, Satz played security videos of the shooting and showed photos. Satz meticulously went through the murders, reminding the jurors how each victim died and how Cruz looked some in the eye before he shot them multiple times. Just minutes earlier, the families had greeted each other with smiles, handshakes and hugs. The mother of a murdered 14-year-old girl fled the courtroom before bursting into loud sobs in the hallway. A large number of the victims’ parents, wives and family members packed their section of the courtroom, many of them weeping during Satz’s presentation. Deliberations are expected to begin Wednesday.Ĭruz, dressed in an off-white sweater, sat impassively during the presentations, occasionally exchanging notes with his attorneys. They can also vote for life out of mercy for Cruz. Jurors can vote for death if they believe the prosecution’s aggravating factors such as the multiple deaths and the planning outweigh the defense’s mitigating circumstances such as his birth mother’s drinking.
The jury will only decide his sentence, and a unanimous vote is required for death. The killings, he said, “were unrelentlessly heinous, atrocious and cruel.”Ĭruz, 24, pleaded guilty a year ago to murdering 14 students and three staff members and wounding 17 others.
#LYNDA CRUZ FLORIDA OBITUARIES TRIAL#
“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. I am going to kill a … ton of people and children.” Satz 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. He fired his AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle into some victims at close range and returned to wounded victims as they lay helpless “to finish them off.” He deserves a death sentence because he “was hunting his victims” as he stalked a three-story classroom building for seven minutes. Lead prosecutor Mike Satz and his defense counterpart, Melisa McNeill, painted for the 12 jurors competing pictures of what drove Cruz’s attack at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day.įor Satz, Cruz was driven by antisocial personality disorder - in lay terms, he’s a sociopath.
The prosecutor and defense attorney for Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz agreed Tuesday that his 2018 attack that killed 17 people was horrible, but disagreed in their closing arguments on whether it was an act of evil worthy of execution or one of a broken person who should be imprisoned for life.
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