Former classmates of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz gave powerful statements during his final day of sentencing.
In a gutwrenching testimony delving into her struggles with PTSD, depression and anxiety after the massacre, survivor Samantha Fuentes said that not only does she struggle with suicidal ideation, but she also “lives in constant fear that somebody exactly like [Cruz] will finish the job [he] failed to do by not killing me.”
“We were children back then, I was still a child when I saw you peering through the window into my Holocaust study class, holding your AR-15,” Ms Fuentes, who shared a class with Cruz when he was a student at Stoneman Douglas High School, said bravely. “I was still a child when I saw you kill two of my friends. You shot me in my leg and if you looked me in the face, you would see the scars from hard shrapnel that was latched into it.”
Ms Fuentes recalled how her friends had attempted to befriend Cruz, who she described as a “hateful bigot with a God Complex” even before the violence unfolded on 14 February 2018. She also decried the defence’s portrayal as a “helpless, vulnerable, dull adult,”
“You are nobody now, you are not special. You have no longer the power,” Ms Fuentes said. “You’ll have the most unremarkable, pathetic existence, one in which I pray for you to suffer.”
Ms Fuentes said that instead of working through his issues and taking the support that he had been offered by the school and students, Cruz had chosen to “throw a tantrum of lethal and tremendous size like the pathetic child you are.”
“You have no power anymore. You have no future. You have nothing,” Ms Funtes said. “The people that you killed, will have more legacy than you. Without your stupid gun, you are nothing.”
Victoria Gonzalez, the girlfriend of victim Joaquin Oliver, also spoke of the trauma she carries in the aftermath of the shooting, saying she once shared a class with Cruz and she “rooted” for the confessed killer, who performed poorly academically.
“Joaquin loved me. For all of my flaws. For everything. He saw the capacity to grow. He saw light shining through the cracks,” Ms Gonzalez said, while wearing a T-shirt worn by Oliver the day before his death, which ominously read, “You, with bullets. I, with balls,” in Spanish.
She continued: “I’m sorry that you never saw the love that the world is capable of giving … I would have wished you the love that I experienced before you led me to the experience of sitting in this courtroom listening to the medical examiner tell me that my best friend’s head was only held together by the skin of his scalp after you were done with him.”
Cruz was formally sentenced on Wednesday, after two days of heartbreaking testimony from survivors and loved ones of the victims killed by Cruz.
He will spend the remainder of his years behind bars after being formally sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the mass murder of 14 students and three staff members at the school.
On 13 October, a 12-person jury recommended that Cruz face a life sentence instead of the death penalty over the Valentine’s Day 2018 mass shooting – in a move that shocked many and horrified the victims’ families.
Jurors found that “especially heinous” aggravating factors necessary to reach a verdict of death had been proven by prosecutors during the trial.
Under Florida law, jurors must be unanimous when returning a verdict of death. If the panel of 12 had recommended a death sentence, the ultimate decision would have come down to the judge to either agree with their recommendation or choose to instead sentence him to life.
