FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — He chose Valentine’s Day because he had no one to love and no one loved him.
He considered sparing two victims but decided against it because they gave him a “nasty look.”
He laid down his weapon after murdering his last victim because he couldn’t find anyone else to kill.
Confessed gunman Nikolas Cruz, whose trial resumed in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom Monday, made a series of admissions to a prosecution psychiatrist in interviews earlier this year — interviews that were recorded on video and played for the jury.
In the final phase of trial testimony, prosecutors are seeking to undermine the defendant’s plea for mercy by showing that Cruz, 24, was never as mentally incapacitated as his defense lawyers would like the jury to believe. Defense witnesses testified that Cruz had a lifelong struggle with mental challenges caused in large part by his mother’s abuse of drugs and alcohol while she was pregnant with him.
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder impaired his ability to control his impulses, defense experts testified, and inhibited his ability to make long-term plans.
But psychiatrist Charles Scott said Cruz, in murdering 17 people and wounding 17 more at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018, demonstrated the kind of behavior, planning and quick thinking that should have been impossible if defense experts were right.
“His executive function, from the time he was in the Uber until he was in the school, was intact,” Scott said. Cruz followed a strategy designed to kill 20 people, adjusted his strategy when the school hallways cleared, tried to shoot out the windows of a teacher’s lounge so he could fire at fleeing students from above, and finally put his AR-15 down only when he realized he couldn’t blend into the crowd with a rifle in his hands.
“I couldn’t find anyone to kill,” Cruz told Scott in one recording. He described killing two victims he considered sparing, Meadow Pollack and Cara Loughran, because “they gave me a nasty look.” He said the same thing about Christopher Hixon, the athletic director who tried to confront him on the first floor.
And he gave a graphic description of the death of his last victim, Peter Wang.
“His head blew up like a water balloon,” Cruz said in the video.
The moments from Cruz’s interview with Scott were played in short clips. There was no indication in any of them that the defendant showed remorse over what he had done. Scott said Cruz’s actions are more consistent with Antisocial Personality Disorder than anything to do with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Cruz, 24, has confessed to killing 17 people and wounding 17 others at the high school he once attended.
He faces the death penalty for each of the 17 murders he committed.
A jury’s unanimous vote is required to sentence Cruz to death; otherwise he will be sentenced to life in prison.
The prosecution’s rebuttal case will resume Tuesday. For now, closing arguments are scheduled for the week of Oct. 10.
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