A prosecutor on Monday urged jurors to sentence to death the gunman who killed 17 people in a mass shooting at a Florida high school in 2018.
The penalty trial of Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz began on Monday, the deadliest US mass shooting to go before a jury.
Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty last October to 17 counts of first-degree murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in the deaths of 14 students and three staff members there on 14 February 2018, and is now only contesting his sentence.
Jurors must decide whether he gets the death penalty or life in prison without parole.
Lead prosecutor Mike Satz had been expected to highlight Cruz’s brutality as he stalked a three-storey classroom building, firing his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle down hallways and into classrooms.
Cruz sometimes walked back to wounded victims and killed them with a second volley of shots.
On Monday afternoon, Satz told the Broward county jurors that Cruz committed “goal-directed, planned, systematic murder – mass murder – of 14 students, an athletic director, a teacher and a coach”.
About three dozen family members of the victims were in the courtroom, sitting together in a roped-off section.
Some shook their heads or wept as Satz described the massacre, naming each of the 17 people who died and another 17 injured in the attack.
Dressed in a gray-and-black sweater and wearing a black face mask to limit the spread of coronavirus, Cruz slumped in his seat, looking down, for much of Satz’s statement. He appeared to write several notes and pass them to his lawyer.
The trial for the former Stoneman Douglas student, expected to last about four months, was supposed to begin in 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic and legal fights delayed it.
Cruz in his guilty plea said he was “very sorry” and asked to be given a chance to help others. Satz said aggravating factors in the case including premeditation outweighed arguments for leniency including Cruz’s history of mental health problems.
Referring to Cruz primarily as “the defendant” rather than by name, Satz said Cruz had planned to be a school shooter long before the attack. Jurors will see video of the crime taken by cameras at the school, Satz said.
Brittany Sinitch, a teacher at the school, was called as the prosecution’s first witness, and described calling the 911 emergency number from her classroom. Her students were writing Valentine’s Day letters as characters from Romeo and Juliet as the attack began.
“Almost instantly, I called 911. They couldn’t hear me over the sound of the gunshots; it was so loud,” she said.
The Parkland shooting is the deadliest to reach trial in US history. Nine other gunmen who killed at least 17 people died during or immediately after their shootings, either by suicide or police gunfire.
The suspect in the 2019 slaying of 23 people in an anti-immigrant shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart is awaiting trial.
