Parkland jury rejects death sentence for school shooter in all 17 murders

A Broward jury showed mercy Thursday to a heartless killer who didn’t know the meaning of the word as he stalked the hallways of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School more than four years ago, viciously ending the lives of 17 innocent people.

Nikolas Cruz, 24, deserves to be punished for those murders, the jury of five women and seven men decided after deliberating for a mere seven hours. Maybe he deserves to be villainized, have his name go down in infamy. But he doesn’t deserve to die, they decided in a split decision that took the judge nearly a suspenseful hour to read.

No jurors looked at Cruz as they entered the courtroom. One man on the jury held his hand to his head, as if the decision took a toll.

Jury foreman Benjamin Thomas said he didn’t vote to sentence Cruz to life in prison. The jury vote was not officially announced Thursday, but Thomas told WFOR-Ch. 4 that three jurors voted against execution.

“There was one with a hard no,” he said. “She couldn’t do it. And there was another two that ended up voting the same way.”

Later in the day, a juror sent Broward Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer a handwritten letter defending herself against rumors in the jury pool “stating that I had already made up my mind on voting for life before the trial started.”

The juror, Denise Cunha, said it wasn’t true.

“I maintained my oath to the court that I would be fair and unbiased,” she wrote. “The deliberations were very tense and some jurors became extremely unhappy once I mentioned that I would vote for life. “

‘Gut punch’

Indeed, the jury’s rejection of the death penalty was met with intense and immediate backlash — called a “miscarriage of justice” and a “gut punch,” among other things.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said it “stings” that “this killer is gonna end up getting the same sentence of people who committed bad acts, but acts that did not rise to this level.”

“I think that if you have a death penalty at all, that this is a case where you’re massacring those students with premeditation and utter disregard for basic humanity, that you deserve the death penalty,” he said at a news conference in Cape Coral.

His opponent on the November ballot, former Gov. Charlie Crist, a Democrat, said he, too, thought execution was the right penalty.

“There are crimes for which the only just penalty is death,” he said on Twitter. “The Parkland families and community deserved that degree of justice.”

Cruz’s guilt was not in question; he admitted committing the crime.

Most of the families of his victims found his pleas for mercy insulting. Through nearly three months of testimony, many sat in court and listened to every witness, speaking only when asked to share their loss with the jury.

Those who died on Feb. 14, 2018, at the Parkland high school were frequently brought up by name throughout the sentencing trial: Alyssa Alhadeff, 14; Scott Beigel, 35; Martin Duque Anguiano, 14; Nicholas Dworet, 17; Aaron Feis, 37; Jaime Guttenberg, 14; Christopher Hixon, 49; Luke Hoyer, 15; Cara Loughran, 14; Gina Montalto, 14; Joaquin Oliver, 17; Alaina Petty, 14; Meadow Pollack, 18; Helena Ramsay, 17; Alexander Schachter, 14; Carmen Schentrup, 16; and Peter Wang, 15.

The legal case of Florida v. Nikolas Cruz should close when Judge Scherer sentences the defendant on Nov. 1 to spend the rest of his natural life in prison for each of the people he killed. Under Florida law, she has no authority to overrule the jury and impose the death penalty.

The quest for closure now belongs to the families of the victims, and no one else. Some of them will speak at the Nov. 1 hearing, prosecutors said.

On a YouTube video seven months before the mass murders, Cruz left comments promising to commit a massacre and looking forward to one particular result: “It makes me happy to see people die,” he wrote. “I love to see the familys [sic] suffer.”

Thursday, suffering family members came forward to express anguish and anger at a justice system they say failed.

Luke’s mother, Gena Hoyer, sobbed into her husband’s arms as they walked out of the courtroom.

Tony Montalto, Gina’s father, was irate over the jury’s decision and sat shaking his head throughout the lengthy reading by the judge.

“She should not have been extinguished by this monster,” he said after the verdicts were read. “Gina deserved better than she got. She deserved better.”

Several of the family members pointed out that the gunman shot their loved one multiple times, and wondered how someone who could do that isn’t worthy of the death penalty.

Max Schachter, Alex’s father, said on Twitter that Cruz got “everything he wanted. While our loved ones are in the cemetery.”

Lori Alhadeff, who won election to the Broward School Board after her daughter Alyssa was murdered, said the outcome Thursday “just makes the fire inside us even want to fight harder for change.”

Debbi Hixon, whose husband Chris was murdered, said she was “devastated and shocked.” The decision suggests Cruz’s life is more important than those whose lives he took, she said.

“I have a son with special needs. I have a son that checked a lot of those boxes that the shooter did as well,” she said. “My son’s not a murderer. My son is the sweetest person you could ever meet.”

Corey Hixon was in court for the reading of the verdicts, but left shortly after the death sentence was rejected in the killing of his father.

An outlier among the families is Robert Schentrup, 23, whose sister Carmen was murdered. He opposes the death penalty and didn’t watch the trial.

“I don’t feel great. There’s no outcome where I could feel great,” he said. “I’m relieved because had the death penalty been awarded, it would have been a decades-long process of appeals until the shooter was executed. It would not be something we could move on.”

The Parkland shooting sparked a crusade for gun control, starting with the March for Our Lives movement. Schentrup, who was a student at the University of Central Florida at the time of his sister’s death, is now an organizing manager for Brady United, a national gun reform group.

Death penalty

Thursday’s decision won’t return the 17 lives that were taken, the children whose only mistake was going to school on Valentine’s Day, or the teachers who tried to save them. It won’t remove the scars from the victims who survived the attack with shrapnel lodged in their skin.

It won’t erase the memories of dozens of children who made their way out of the building by stepping over the bodies and blood of their slaughtered classmates.

The jury’s decision won’t reopen the doors of the 1200 building at the Parkland high school campus. It won’t mop the bloodstains from the floors and walls, restore the shattered glass to the classroom doors, or complete the unfinished assignments that were abandoned mid-thought by the terrified students when the firing began.

But it ends the only mystery associated with the case — is this the “worst of the worst” scenario lawmakers envisioned when they made the death penalty legal again in Florida?

Broward defense lawyer Elias Hilal, who is not associated with the case, said the death penalty in Broward County was effectively overturned.

“Nobody in this county can ever get the death penalty again,” he said. “These poor kids were killed in a cold-blooded murder by a monster, yet this killer gets to sit in jail while their parents go home to an empty bedroom.”

The decision came two days after a separate jury recommended death in the case of Peter Avsenew, convicted after a retrial for the murders of Kevin Powell, 52, and Stephen Adams, 47, a Wilton Manors couple who took him into their home during the 2010 holiday season.

Cruz, 19 when he committed the Stoneman Douglas murders, offered almost immediately to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. The Broward Public Defender’s Office, which represented him, argued repeatedly that accepting life over death would avoid the spectacle of a trial and the trauma of introducing the evidence.

Prosecutors rejected the offer, refusing to allow the defendant to choose his own fate.

Over the course of four years, the public learned how many times Cruz was identified as a safety threat, and how little was done to address it. The Broward Sheriff’s Office, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Broward schools were among those in a position to intervene — and failed.

“Had one person done their job at the school district, had one person done their job at BSO, I might not be standing here today,” said Ryan Petty, whose daughter Alaina, 14, was slain. His activism after the shooting led the governor to appoint him to the Florida Board of Education.

Andrew Pollock, whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow was among the murdered, said his mission was to seek accountability for the many who might have stopped Cruz from becoming a school shooter, but didn’t.

Reached after the verdict, he said he wasn’t invested in that outcome.

“I feel bad for all the parents that wanted the death penalty,” he said.

While in custody, Cruz attacked a detention deputy who was guarding him, leading to an additional criminal charge that served as a barometer of how potential jurors would feel about deciding his fate for the Parkland murders. Potential jurors for the jail attack trial broke down in tears when they saw Cruz. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty.

At the same time, Cruz also pleaded guilty to the school shooting. Standing before a packed courtroom on Oct. 20, 2021, he addressed the judge in a rambling monotone that sounded like he was reading from prepared notes. He wasn’t.

“I am very sorry for what I did and I have to live with it every day and that if I were to get a second chance I would do everything in my power to try to help others,” he said. “And I am doing this for you and I do not care if you do not believe me, and I love you and I know you don’t believe me but I have to live with this every day and it brings me nightmares and I can’t live with myself sometimes but I try to push through because I know that’s what you guys would want me to do.”

Family members of the slain victims greeted his confession with undisguised contempt.

‘The whole truth’

Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor issued a statement Thursday highlighting the trial’s value in exposing all the facts, no matter how painful. Maybe it will help bring “some measure of finality and justice,” he said.

“I thank everyone who worked to ensure that the whole truth — the full story — was told about this tragedy with full transparency,” he said. “To my knowledge, this is the first time that the full story of a community’s loss and all of the relevant facts have been told about a mass shooting of this magnitude. We have not shied away from telling all of the horror, all of the loss, all of the devastation, all of the pain, all of the facts, all of the truth.”

The trial was rare in mass shooting cases; most suspects kill themselves or are killed by police.

Linda Beigel Schulman, whose son Scott Beigel, a teacher, was gunned down in the school, said prosecutor Mike Satz promised her something.

“By the time, we’re finished with this case, every single person who was murdered — people will know who they are,” she said he told her. “They will not just be a name, but people will know exactly who they are, will know a face and will know everything about them. And that’s exactly what he did.”

In all, nearly 1,800 jurors were screened in a process that began April 4 and pushed further and further into the summer. In the end, 22 were chosen to sit through the trial. Ten were alternates, unaware that their services would no longer be required once deliberations began.

Testimony began July 18, after prosecutor Satz delivered an opening statement outlining the state’s case. In the weeks that followed, the jury was presented with graphic videos and photographs and heart-wrenching testimony from survivors of the Stoneman Douglas massacre.

They heard how Cruz calmly walked into the school, unpacked a rifle, gunned down people as crowds fled, then left the campus with groups of students who were trying to escape. He was captured later walking down a street after going to a nearby Walmart and McDonalds — where the brother of a shooting victim refused to give him a ride home.

The prosecution’s case reached a crescendo the week of Aug. 1, when family members began testifying and jurors walked through the building where the mass shooting occurred.

On the evidence, the prosecution made its case, the jury found unanimously. But three jurors were persuaded by the defense plea for mercy, which was based on evidence Cruz suffered Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder because his biological mother drank during pregnancy.

Throughout the prosecution’s case, defense lawyers barely spoke. There was nothing to dispute, lead defense lawyer Melisa McNeill later told the jury. The defense case sought to separate the crime from the person who committed it, to present Cruz as “brain-damaged, broken and mentally ill,” deserving of a life sentence, but undeserving of death.

The case took an emotional toll on everyone, Broward Public Defender Gordon Weekes said — including the people charged with defending a client many wrote off as indefensible.

“The day this occurred, I reflected on my own children,” Weekes said. “And I cried like a baby, trying to put into context what just occurred in our community.”

Defense lawyers knew better than to celebrate, but afterward they expressed hope that the verdict would be the first step in the process of healing.

Prosecutors had to be content knowing the final decision was made by a jury — not Cruz himself.

Cruz could be seen smirking, just before he avoided a sentence he feared.

“He’s going to have to look over his shoulder every minute of the rest of his life,” Schulman said. “I hope he has the fear in him, every second of his life, just the way he gave that fear to every one of our loved ones who he murdered.”

Staff writers Anthony Man, Scott Travis and Shira Moolten contributed to this report.