Parents, wives, children, and siblings of the 17 people murdered by Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz got their final chance to verbally thrash him face-to-face Wednesday before he was sentenced to life behind bars.
The second day of Cruz's sentencing hearing ended with the gunman formally sentenced to life without parole for the Feb. 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
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Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer had no choice but to impose that sentence as the jury in Cruz's penalty trial could not unanimously agree that he deserved the death penalty.
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Cruz acknowledged under questioning by the judge before sentencing that he is on medication but could understand what was occurring.
Scherer commended the families and wounded who testified, calling them strong, graceful and patient.
“I know you are going to be OK, because you have each other,” Scherer said.
The judge’s voice broke as she read the first of the 34 life sentences, but she her voice gained strength and volume she moved down the list. Some parents and other family members wept as she read.
Among the family members who spoke Wednesday was Manuel Oliver, whose 17-year-old son, Joaquin, was killed in the shooting. Manuel Oliver had stayed away from the courtroom throughout the sentencing trial.
"You're gonna die before me and I will celebrate when you die," Oliver told the gunman. "You understand that you will suffer and you will go through pain, a lot of pain."
"You are out of the picture and you will be erased from the picture, sooner than later. It's time for you to be afraid of me," Oliver added later.
Cruz, 24, will be taken within days to the Florida prison system's processing center near Miami before he is assigned to a maximum-security prison.
“It was extremely painful to hear all the horrific details of this massacre at our children’s high school," Annika Dworet, who with her husband, Mitch, attended every day of Cruz's trial said Wednesday. “Just to be in the same room as this monster who killed our son Nicholas and attempted to murder our son Alex. It’s unbearable."
She continued, “One of the most disgusting and unprofessional actions that occurred in this courtroom was the defense team holding, touching and giggling with this cold-blooded murderer."
“You deserve the opportunity to rot away,” David Alhadeff, the uncle of Alyssa Alhadeff, told Cruz via Zoom from his classroom in Maryland. “You deserve the opportunity to absorb the look of terror on your face once you leave this courtroom. You deserve the opportunity of knowing that justice will prevail at some point, causing you great anguish, minute by minute, day by day.”
"Do you remember after you sprayed my classroom with bullets standing in the door, peering in to the see the work you've done? Do you remember my little battered, bloody face looking back at you? I could have sworn we locked eyes," victim Samantha Fuentes said. "This is only the beginning of how you ruined my life and many others. It's not the physical suffering. It's not just that you killed and injured a total of 34 people. It's the fact that I'll have to live with the aftermath of this for the rest of my life."
Linda Beigel Schulman, mother of teacher Scott Beigel, spoke of vengeance when she got her turn to confront Cruz.
“Real justice would be done if every family here were given a bullet and your AR-15 and we got to pick straws, and each one of us got to shoot one at a time at you, making sure that you felt every bit of it, and your fear continued to mount until the last family member who pulled that last straw had the privilege of making sure that they killed you," Beigel Schulman said. “That’s real justice for you.”
Beigel Schulman said she takes some comfort in knowing that Cruz is headed to a maximum-security prison where he will have to worry constantly about his safety for the rest of his life.
“From what I hear, child killers are highly frowned upon and hated in prison,” Beigel Schulman said to Cruz. “I welcome the day that I’m told that you’ve been tortured and taken out for your cold-blooded, premediated, calculated, heinous murders, because you deserve no less.”
Cruz, shackled and wearing a red jail jumpsuit, stared at the speakers but showed little emotion, as he did the day before.
When Jennifer Guttenberg, mother of victim Jaime Guttenberg, got up to speak, she started by admonishing Cruz for hiding his face and expressions behind a blue COVID mask, prompting Cruz to remove the face covering.
A day earlier, members of the victims' families and some of the 17 wounded who survived went to a lectern about 20 feet from the gunman, stared him in the eye, and let out their anger and grief, with many telling the 24-year-old they hope his remaining years are filled with the fear and pain he inflicted. Many also criticized a Florida law that requires jury unanimity for a death sentence to be imposed — the shooter's jurors voted 9-3 on Oct. 13 for his execution.
“He has escaped this punishment because a minority of the jury was given the power to overturn the majority decision made by people who were able to see him for what he is – a remorseless monster who deserves no mercy," Meghan Petty said. Her younger sister, 14-year-old Alaina, died when Cruz fired his AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle into her classroom as he stalked the halls of a three-story building for seven minutes, firing 140 shots. He had been planning the shooting for seven months.
“A person has to be incredibly sick to want to hurt another human being. Even sicker to dwell on the desire and craft a plan and unimaginably evil to execute that plan, which didn’t just hurt people but ended lives," she said. "To add insult to a murder he was even arrogant enough to plan a disguise believing that he’d be able to escape his actions while my sister lay dying on a dirty classroom floor."
Cruz, a former Stoneman Douglas student and then 19, wore a school shirt so that he could blend in with fleeing students as he escaped. He was arrested an hour later.
Anthony Montalto III, whose older sister, 14-year-old Gina, was murdered by a bullet fired point-blank into her chest, said he was at the neighboring middle school and heard the gunshots. He said he felt a pain in his chest — he believes it was a sign of his sister's death.
"To go from a younger brother to an only child…is a dramatic change for anyone,” he said. He then criticized the defense claim that excessive drinking by Cruz's birth mother during pregnancy caused brain damage that led to a life of erratic and sometimes violent behavior that culminated in the shooting.
"This reality I now live in is an unfortunate truth. An even more unfortunate truth is that this country has forgotten who the victim is. The murderer is not a victim of drinking during pregnancy. He is not a victim of mental health issues. He is a murdering bastard who should be made an example of," Montalto said.
Anne Ramsay recounted the last text she got from her 17-year-old daughter Helena, thanking her for the Valentine's cookie she had packed for her. That afternoon, Helena also died when Cruz fired into her classroom.
“She was a lovely girl, an angel,” Ramsay said.
She said she had mixed feelings before the trial about whether the gunman should get the death penalty, but after hearing the evidence she has no doubt that would have been the proper punishment.
"You are pure evil," she told Cruz.
Thomas Hixon's father, athletic director Chris Hixon, was shot when he burst through a door and ran at Cruz, trying to stop him. The Navy veteran fell wounded on the floor and tried to take cover in an alcove, but Cruz walked over and shot him again.
Thomas Hixon, a Marine veteran, recalled the gunman claiming remorse a year ago when he pleaded guilty to the murders, setting the stage for the penalty trial.
“Where was your remorse when you saw my father injured and bleeding on the floor and decided to shoot him for a third time?” Hixon told Cruz. “Your defense preyed on the idea of your humanity, but you had none for those you encountered on February 14th."
Ines Hixon, Thomas' wife and a Navy flight officer, said she was deployed off Iran and had returned from a flight when she saw an email from her husband that his father had been killed. She assumed it was in a car crash, only finding out in a phone call he had been shot.
“When he told me what had happened, I collapsed to the floor,” she said, crying. She called Cruz “a domestic terrorist.”
“Through my service, I thought I was the one in danger but it was my family being slain back home," she said.
