Nikolas Cruz sentencing trial live updates Day 3: Rifle shots 'obliterated' student's ankle

FORT LAUDERDALE — Follow along for live coverage of the sentencing trial of Nikolas Cruz, who pleaded guilty last year to killing 17 people and wounding 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Feb. 14, 2018.

A 12-person jury will decide whether to recommend that Cruz, then 19 and now 23, is put to death or sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole. If it recommends death, Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer will make the final ruling, likely sometime this fall.

Cruz lived briefly with a family friend near Lantana in the weeks before the Parkland shootings.

Stoneman Douglas, Day 2: Students describe slain classmates' final moments

Understanding the trial: What to know as next phase of Nikolas Cruz trial begins

Student: Cruz blended with other students outside school after shooting

Kyle Laman said the fire alarm made him feel "weird and anxious," but he filed into the third floor hallway with everyone else. Cruz, armed with an AR-15, walked through the stairwell doors, and the students fell quiet.

Then he began to shoot, and they began to scream.

Laman felt a sharp pain in his foot and looked down. His ankle had been "blown off to bits," he said. "Obliterated."

“ 'We’re going to die,' " he said he told the boy next to him. " 'What do we do?' ”

Another student, Tyler West, said he saw Joaquin Oliver lying on the ground in the alcove of the women’s restroom. Joaquin, who is one of the 17 students and staff members who died that day, was bleeding. He told Tyler that he couldn't move his legs.

West saw an opportunity to run, and he took it.

Nicolette Miciotta testified that she saw Cruz outside Stoneman Douglas after the shooting. He blended in with everyone else, she said.

She asked him if he had college plans, and he responded: "Summer in Florida."

She said she had no idea what he'd done.

Fire alarm sent students directly into Cruz's path

Stacey Lippel taught creative writing on the third floor of the freshman building. From there, the gunshots sounded low and muted.

"It didn't sound menacing," Lippel said. She thought a computer cart might have toppled over.

Then the fire alarm went off, and she ushered her students out into the hall. Students near the stairs began to scream and surge backward once Cruz appeared.

“I saw the shooter emerge from the stairwell," Lippel said.

He raked the AR-15 back and forth, firing "shot after shot after shot."

He hit 10 people, six of whom died immediately or within minutes of being shot: Scott Beigel (a teacher in the classroom next to Lippel's), Jaime Guttenberg, Cara Loughran, Joaquin Oliver, Meadow Pollack and Peter Wang.

Meadow and Joaquin, both 17, were Lippel's students.

Cruz then shot through the window in the door to Lippel's classroom, where she and a group of students had gathered to hide. Lippel said she waited to see his hand reach through the glass to unlock the door, but it never did. Instead, the sound of bullets receded down the hall.

Anthony Borges, a student shot five times in the lungs, abdomen and legs, screamed for help in the hallway outside. He screamed in Spanish and English.

"We couldn’t open the door," Lippel said.

Borges had been shot five times. He unzipped his jacket in the courtroom Wednesday and showed jurors the scars along his back and torso. He's had 14 surgeries since the shooting.

Bullets grazed teacher Earnest Rospierski's face and hip as he shielded students from Cruz in hallway alcoves. When the gunman stopped to reload, he hurried them into a classroom.

Jaime Guttenberg's parents watched from the courtroom as Rospierski testified. Rospierski said he saw their daughter in the hallway and bent to check on her before moving quickly to protect others. There was nothing he could do for her by then, he said.

When prosecutors played a video too graphic for the rest of the courtroom to see, Cruz pressed his thumbs in his ears, blocking the sound of a boy moaning.

In the video, kids were heard saying "Look straight, look straight!" presumably as they were evacuated from the freshman building. One girl wailed, "Oh my God! Oh my God!" The judge looks disturbed.

Carmen Schentrup's teacher, classmates describe classroom in chaos

Ronit Reoven, an AP psychology teacher at Stoneman Douglas, described the piercing sound of the fire alarm and the vibrations in her chest as the gunshots got closer and louder. Dust and debris fell from the ceiling, and children fled into the corners of the first-floor classroom.

"I could hear whimpering," Reoven said.

Samantha Mayor, a student in Reoven's fourth-period class, said she closed her eyes when Cruz began shooting and only opened them once it had quieted. Her classmates started to scream and moan.

Carmen Schentrup, 17, was fatally shot. Mayor and two other students were wounded.

Another witness, Logan Mitchell, testified that he used his jacket to bandage Maddy Wilford, who was shot three times and drifted in and out of consciousness. She survived.

Parkland teacher said she first thought the deadly attack was a drill

Juletta Matlock, who oversaw study hall, doesn't remember exactly what happened after she heard the first three gunshots, but students told her later that she shouted: "Get down!"

She believed it was a drill at first, even after the glass of her door window exploded inward. That seemed excessive, she thought – but they'd been warned that a drill was coming.

" 'This is it,' " Matlock said she thought. " 'They're trying to catch us off guard.' "

The sound of screams next door told her otherwise.

Two of her students, 14-year-old Martin Duque Anguiano and 15-year-old Luke Hoyer, had asked for hall passes to go to the media center that period. Cruz killed them as they walked through the hallway.

Gina Montalto, 14, was also excused from Matlock's classroom about an hour before the shooting. Cruz killed her in the hallway, where she had sat with her laptop to work on a class project.

Another of Wednesday's witnesses, Ivy Schamis, taught History of the Holocaust in the freshman building. She recognized the sound of gunfire as soon as it began, she said, and her students "flew out of their seats" to find cover. They scrambled behind filing cabinets and bookshelves and got low to the ground.

Bullets came through the glass panel in the door. "It was extremely loud. It was very frightening," Schamis said. "I kept thinking about these kids that should not be experiencing this at all."

Schamis broke down for the first time during her testimony when prosecutor Michael Satz showed her photos of 17-year-olds Helena Ramsay and Nick Dworet, who died in her classroom.

"That's my girl, Helena," Schamis said.

Stoneman Douglas survivors recount terror during Parkland shooting

Ashley Baez, a Stoneman Douglas alumna, entered the freshman building moments before Cruz began to shoot.

She saw someone in the stairwell "who looked freaked out," Baez said. She turned around then and saw Cruz, armed with an AR-15. She started to run.

Cruz shot her in the legs before she reached the unlocked classroom where she took cover. The injuries took four surgeries to repair, Baez said.

The next witness, Genesis Valentin, was in class when the shooting began. She mistook the sound of gunfire for popping balloons. It was Valentine's Day, she said. Everyone had balloons.

But then she heard screaming, and she and her classmates began to hide. Valentin said she watched 14-year-olds Alyssa Alhadeff and Alaina Petty get shot beside her.

"They were both instantly gone," Valentin said.

Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Live updates: Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz sentencing trial, Day 3