US shooting: Nicolas Cruz pleaded guilty to 17 counts of murder and 17 attempted murder. (file)
Washington:
A traumatic video of the Valentine’s Day 2018 shooting at a Florida high school that killed 17 people was put on trial on Monday for the sentencing of the man who admitted to committing the massacre.
Nicolas Cruz pleaded guilty to 17 counts of manslaughter and 17 counts of attempted murder for the October attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
A 12-person jury is to decide whether the now 23-year-old should receive the death penalty or life sentence for what prosecutor Mike Saitz called “cold, calculating, manipulative and deadly” genocide.
“I’m going to talk to you about this defendant’s goal-directed, planned, systematic murder, mass murder, 14 children, an athletic director, a teacher, and a coach,” Saitz said in the opening arguments.
A cellphone video recorded by a student, Danielle Gilbert, was played for the jury. The audio was made available to the public gallery and to journalists.
Several shots stopped screaming, crying and moaning as the students tried to avoid bullets coming from the door in their classroom.
“It can’t be real,” someone was heard whispering.
Gilbert, who was in tears as the video was played, said that one person died and three were injured in the classroom.
Cruz, wearing a black Covid mask, covered his face with his hands and looked at the table in front of him while the video was playing.
Many of the victims’ relatives fled the courtroom, while others wept openly and hugged their loved ones.
next school shooter
The prosecutor, Saitz, told the jury that three days before the shooting, Cruz made a cellphone video in which he said, “I’m going to be the next school shooter of 2018.”
“My target is at least 20 people with an AR-15 and some tracer rounds,” Cruz said in the video. “It’s going to be a big event and when you see me on the news, you’ll know who I am.”
Saitz said Cruise ordered a drink at a Subway sandwich shop after escaping from school and then went to McDonald’s, where he asked the brother of a girl he had just shot for a ride.
The boy, who did not know at the time that Cruz was the attacker, refused. Cruz was arrested shortly after.
The trial in Fort Lauderdale is a rare example of a mass shooter facing a jury, as they often either take their own lives or are killed by police.
The death penalty requires that the jury be unanimous. Cruz would otherwise be given life without parole.
The shooting in Florida shocked a country addicted to gun violence and sparked new efforts, led by school students, to inspire lawmakers to pass tougher gun control laws.
march for our lives
Parkland survivors founded a “March for Our Lives” in 2018 in the nation’s capital, Washington, holding a rally that attracted hundreds of thousands of people.
Thousands turned out for demonstrations organized by the group last month after two other mass shootings: one at a Texas elementary school that killed 19 children and two teachers, and another at a New York supermarket that killed 10 black people.
Those shootings helped support support for the first significant federal bill on gun safety in decades.
President Joe Biden signed the bill into law in June, but it fell short of the steps he called for, including a ban on assault weapons.
Despite having a documented history of mental health problems, Cruz legally purchased the AR-15 semi-automatic used in the attack.
After being expelled from school for disciplinary reasons, Cruise was known to have fixated on firearms – and was identified as a potential threat to his classmates.
On the day of the attack, he arrived at the school in an Uber, opened indiscriminate fire at students and staff, and fled nine minutes later, leaving behind a scene of massacre.
The Justice Department reached a $127.5 million settlement in March with survivors and relatives of the Parkland victims, who accused the FBI of negligence for failing to act on suggestions received before the attack that Cruz was dangerous.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)