The Riverside Press-Enterprise
School shooter Cruz contemplated massacre for years before attack
FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. >> Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz told a prosecution psychiatrist he began contemplating a mass murder during middle school, doing extensive research on earlier killers to learn their methods and mistakes to shape his own plans, video played at his penalty trial showed Monday.
Cruz told Dr. Charles Scott during a March jailhouse interview that five years before he murdered 17 at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018, he read about the 1999 murder of 13 at Colorado’s Columbine High School, which sparked the idea of his own mass killing. Cruz told Scott how Columbine, the 2007 murder of 32 at Virginia Tech University and the 2012 killing of 12 at a Colorado movie theater all played a part in his preparation.
“I studied mass murderers and how they did it,” Cruz told Scott. “How they planned, what they got and what they used.” He learned to watch for people coming around corners to stop him, to keep some distance from people as he fired, to attack “as fast as possible” and, in the earlier attacks, “the police didn’t do anything.”
“I should have the opportunity to shoot people for about 20 minutes,” Cruz said.
Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty a year ago to the murders that happened during a seven-minute attack on Feb. 14, 2018 — the trial will only decide whether he is sentenced to death or life without the possibility of parole. A unanimous vote by the seven-man, fivewoman jury is required for Cruz to get death. Anything less and his sentence will be life.
Prosecutor Mike Satz hopes Scott’s testimony will rebut the defense’s contention that heavy drinking by Cruz’s birth mother during pregnancy caused fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, putting him on a lifelong path of bizarre and sometimes violent behavior that culminated in the shootings. The defense also tried to show that his adoptive mother, Lynda Cruz, became overwhelmed after her husband died when Cruz was 5 and never got him complete treatment for his mental health issues. She died less than three months before the shootings.
Scott, a University of California, Davis, forensic psychiatrist, testified Monday that his examinations of Cruz and his school and mental health records don’t support the defense findings. He diagnosed Cruz with antisocial personality disorder, saying the 24-year-old former Stoneman Douglas student can control his behavior but chooses not to because he has no regard for others. For example, Scott pointed to Cruz’s 14-month employment as a cashier at a discount store with no incidents.
He also said Cruz did well in alternative education classes taken after he was expelled from Stoneman Douglas a year before the shootings, getting a perfect score in a course on violence and guns.
He said Cruz’s behavior spiraled after a girlfriend broke up with him 18 months before the killings.