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A jury will quickly decide if confessed Parkland faculty shooter Nikolas Cruz can be sentenced to dying.
Opening arguments started Monday within the penalty part of Cruz’s trial. The trial is predicted to take a number of months. On the conclusion, the jury’s determination have to be unanimous to condemn him to dying.
Prosecutor Mike Satz stated in his opening assertion: “Three days earlier than the bloodbath, Cruz made a video saying, ‘My title is Nik. I’ll be the following faculty shooter of 2018. My aim is a minimum of 20 folks with an AR-15 and a few tracer rounds. It is gonna be a giant occasion and once you see me on the information you will know who I’m. You are all gonna die. … I can not wait.'”
Satz described the capturing as a “deliberate, systematic … mass homicide.”
Gena Hoyer, mom of Luke Hoyer, hugs Debbie Hixon throughout a court docket recess following the responsible pleas of Parkland faculty shooter Nikolas Cruz on the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Oct. 20, 2021.
Amy Beth Bennett/POOL through Reuters
On Feb. 14, 2018, Cruz, then 19, gunned down 14 college students and three employees members at his former faculty, Marjory Stoneman Douglas Excessive College, in South Florida.
On the day of the capturing, Cruz, carrying a backpack and carrying a case with a rifle inside, walked 360 toes from the street to the doorways of Constructing 12, Satz stated. Cruz warned a pupil within the stairwell to go away, saying “one thing dangerous is about to occur,” after which that pupil ran to discover a campus monitor, Satz stated.
The rampage started at 2:21 p.m. as Cruz opened fireplace on 4 college students standing in a primary flooring hallway, Satz stated.
Seventy pictures have been fired on the primary flooring, Satz stated.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas Excessive College shooter Nikolas Cruz along with his attorneys, Chief Assistant Public Defender David Wheeler, left, and Assistant Public Defender Tamara Curtis, proper, stands earlier than opening statements within the penalty part of his trial on the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., July 18, 2022. Cruz, who has pleaded responsible to gunning down 17 folks at his former highschool in Parkland, will obtain both the dying penalty or a life sentence.
Carline Jean/Pool through AFP/Getty Pictures
Satz went on to stipulate the remainder of the timeline, strolling the jury by means of how lecturers and college students on the second flooring heard the gunfire and hid inside their lecture rooms.
After firing pictures on the second flooring, Cruz went to the third flooring, the place amongst these killed was trainer Scott Beigel, who was shepherding youngsters to security in his classroom, Satz stated.
A complete of 139 rounds have been fired in Constructing 12, Satz stated, and Cruz then fled the varsity by mixing in with different college students. He was arrested round 3:40 p.m. about 2.9 miles from the varsity, Satz stated.
Kinfolk and members of the family arrive for the primary day of the sentencing trial for convicted Parkland faculty shooter Nikolas Cruz on the Broward County Judicial Complicated in downtown Fort Lauderdale, Fla., July 18, 2022.
Carl Juste/Pool through AP
Cruz pleaded responsible in October 2021 to 17 counts of first-degree homicide and 17 counts of tried first-degree homicide.
Cruz stated in court docket final 12 months, “I’m very sorry for what I did and I’ve to reside with it day-after-day. … It brings me nightmares and I can not reside with myself generally.”
Cruz, the deadliest mass shooter to ever go earlier than a jury, stated in court docket he believes the victims’ households must be those to resolve whether or not he will get the dying penalty.
Cameron Kasky, a Parkland pupil in 2018 and now a gun-reform activist, known as the dying penalty “barbaric” in a tweet Sunday.
The dying penalty “won’t convey any of the victims again” and can “create a false sense of Justice, which is able to solely come when the gun producers and the politicians who assist them are held accountable,” Kasky wrote.
The “shooter doesn’t need to reside, however the U.S. authorities and our ‘justice’ system is incapable of responsibly wielding the facility to find out worth in life,” he wrote. “It is the politicians who assist the gun foyer that must be held accountable.”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas Excessive College shooter Nikolas Cruz crosses the courtroom in handcuffs, Oct. 20, 2021, on the Broward County Courthouse after being sentenced on 4 legal counts stemming from his assault on a Broward County jail guard in November 2018, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Amy Beth Bennett/Pool through Getty Pictures, FILE
Manuel Oliver, whose 17-year-old son Joaquin died in Parkland, instructed Miami ABC affiliate WPLG, “I feel he ought to die and I feel that’s not sufficient. … Not even the dying penalty is sufficient.”
Fred Guttenberg, who has been preventing for gun reform since his 14-year-old daughter Jaime was killed in Parkland, tweeted Monday, “One week in the past right now I used to be on the @WhiteHouse to have fun @POTUS signing gun security laws. Right this moment, I’m on the Courthouse for the beginning of the penalty part of the legal trial of the one who murdered my daughter with an AR 15. That is the truth of gun violence.”
“Jaime, I miss you past phrases,” he added in one other tweet.
Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son Alex was killed, tweeted Monday morning, “I like you Alex.”
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