Nikolas Cruz had “planned a systematic massacre”, launched a prosecutor on Tuesday on the last day of the trial of this young American who killed 17 people in a Florida school in 2018.
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After three months of trying hearings in Fort Lauderdale, the prosecution and the defense crossed swords one last time before the jurors responsible for setting the killer’s sentence.
On February 14, 2018, Nikolas Cruz, then 19, opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at the Parkland school, from which he had been expelled a year earlier. In less than ten minutes, he had killed 14 students and three employees, and injured 17 people.
This bloodbath, one of the bloodiest ever committed in a school environment in the United States, had sparked shock waves throughout the country and giant demonstrations for better supervision of firearms.
He pleaded guilty last year and the jury is faced with an alternative: to sentence him to the death penalty as demanded by the prosecution — an option which imposes complete unanimity among these 12 citizens — or to a sentence of incompressible life imprisonment as requested by the defense.
Beginning his indictment, prosecutor Michael Satz insisted on the premeditated nature of the drama, detailing in detail the preparations of the killer and his progress in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on this Valentine’s Day.
Nikolas Cruz had announced that he wanted to “kill children in a school” in a video recorded a few days earlier and which represents “a window on his soul”, he recalled. “That’s what he wanted to do, that’s what he had planned and that’s what he did,” hammered the prosecutor.
Dressed in a striped beige sweater, the young man took his head in his hands when a video was broadcast which was supposed to show, according to Michael Satz, “how tactical and determined his actions were”.
His lawyers should then insist on his difficult childhood to claim leniency from the jurors.