Prosecutors Detail Parkland Gunman’s ‘Systematic Massacre’ Ahead of Jury Deliberation on Death Penalty

Prosecutors in closing arguments at the trial for the Parkland gunman Tuesday described the “systematic massacre” he carried out when he killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.

It marked the end of the death-penalty trial, which lasted nearly three months and focused on devastating details of the school shooting and the gunman’s history of mental health issues.

Nikolas Cruz, now 24, pleaded guilty last year to 17 counts of first-degree murder for the school shooting. A jury is now tasked with deciding whether he will be sentenced to death or to life in prison without parole. They are expected to begin deliberations on Wednesday.

“This plan was goal-directed. It was calculated. It was purposeful, and it was a systematic massacre,” lead prosecutor Michael Satz said Tuesday, calling out the gunman’s “unspeakable, horrific brutality.”

During the trial, jurors heard emotional testimony from students and teachers, and they visited the school building to see classrooms stained with blood and marked by bullet holes, unchanged since the day of the shooting.

“It has been said that what one writes and what one says is a window into someone’s soul,” Satz said Tuesday, pointing to comments Cruz had made on YouTube about wanting to kill a “ton of people and murder children” and “see the families suffer.”

Satz recounted in harrowing detail how Cruz attacked students and teachers at the school on Feb. 14, 2018, killing some victims at close range while they tried to defend themselves.

Defense attorneys for Cruz focused on his childhood and mental-health history, arguing that his biological mother’s abuse of drugs and alcohol during pregnancy caused him to suffer from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and that he struggled from a young age with behavioral issues that were never properly treated.

They didn’t dispute what happened on the day of the shooting. “Nikolas knew the difference between right and wrong that day, and he chose wrong,” his public defender, Melisa McNeill, said during closing arguments on Tuesday. “What he did has never been in dispute.”

But she argued that because of his history of mental illness and brain damage, he should be sentenced to life in prison, not to death. “We are not asking you to let Nikolas Cruz walk out of this courtroom,” she said. “We are asking you to punish him and to punish him severely. We are asking you to sentence him to prison for the rest of his life.”

Victims’ family members, who had given heart-wrenching impact statements earlier in the trial, sat solemnly in the courtroom on Tuesday, while lawyers made their final case.

“There is no punishment that you could ever give Nikolas Cruz that would ever make him suffer as much as those people have,” McNeill said, referring to the victims’ family and friends. “Sentencing Nikolas to death will not change that. It will not bring back those 17 people.”

But prosecutors argued that aggravating factors—including that the murders were “cold, calculated, and premeditated” and “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel”—outweigh those mitigating circumstances, urging jurors to decide in favor of the death penalty.

“There is no brain damage. There is damage to his personality and to his character,” Satz said. “And hate is not a mental disorder.”