FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida. (AP) – Roses that were brought to honor love on Valentine’s Day in 2018 lay withered, their dried and cracked petals strewn across classroom floors still smeared with the blood of victims shot by an elder pupil more than four years earlier.
Bullet holes ripped through walls and shards of glass from windows shattered by gunfire creaked eerily underfoot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where shooter Nikolas Cruz 14 students and three staff members were murdered. Nothing had been changed except for the removal of the victims’ bodies and some personal items.
The 12 jurors and 10 alternates who will decide whether Cruz will face the death penalty or life in prison paid a rare visit to the scene of the massacre Thursday, retracing Cruz’s steps through the three-year freshman building. floors, known as “Building 12”. After they left, a group of reporters were allowed in for a much quicker public first view.
The sight was deeply disturbing. Large pools of dried blood still stained the classroom floors. A lock of black hair lay on the floor where the body of one of the victims once lay. A single black rubber shoe stood in a hallway. Burnished rose petals were strewn across a hallway where six people died.
Class after class, open notebooks displayed incomplete lesson plans. A bloodied book titled “Tell Them We Remember” lay on a bullet-riddled desk in the classroom where teacher Ivy Schamis was teaching students about the Holocaust. Attached to a bulletin board in the room, a sign reads: “We will never forget.”
In the classroom of English teacher Dara Hass, where most of the students were shot, students had written articles about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot dead by the Taliban for going to school. school and who has since been a global advocate for access to education for women and girls.
One of the students wrote: “A bullet went straight to his head but not to his brain.” Another reading: “We go to school every day of the week and we take everything for granted. We cry and complain without knowing how lucky we are to be able to learn.”
The door to room 1255, teacher Stacey Lippel’s classroom, was pushed open — like others to signify Cruz shot it. Hanging on a wall inside was a sign that read “No Bully Zone”. Creative writing task of the day written on the whiteboard. “How to write the perfect love letter.”
And still hanging on the wall in a second-floor hallway was a quote from James Dean. “Dream as if you will live forever, live as if you will die today.”
In Professor Scott Beigel’s geography classroom, his laptop was still open on his desk. Student assignments comparing the tenets of Christianity and Islam remained there, some graded, some not. On his whiteboard, Beigel, the school’s cross-country coach, had written the gold, silver and bronze medalists in each event of the Winter Olympics, which had started five days earlier. .
Prosecutors, who closed their case after the jury visit, hope the visit will help prove that Cruz’s actions were cold, calculated, heinous and cruel; created a great risk of death for many people and “interfered with a government function” – all aggravating factors under Florida’s capital punishment law.
Under Florida court rules, neither the judge nor the attorneys were allowed to speak to the jurors — and the jurors were not allowed to converse with each other — when they retraced the path Cruz took on the 1st february. On December 14, 2018, as he methodically moved from floor to floor, shooting in hallways and classrooms as he went. Before the tour, the jurors had already seen the surveillance video filming and photography to follow.
The building has been sealed off and is now surrounded by a 15 foot (4.6 meter) chain link fence wrapped in privacy mesh secured with zip ties. It looms ominously over the school and its teachers, staff and 3,300 students, and can be easily seen by anyone nearby. The Broward County School District plans to tear it down whenever prosecutors approve it. For the moment, it is an exhibit.
“When you walk past, it’s there. When you go to class, it’s there. It’s just a colossal structure that you can’t miss,” said Kai Koerber, who was a Stoneman Douglas junior at the time of filming. He is now at the University of California, Berkeley, and the developer of a mental health phone app. “It’s just a constant reminder…that this is extremely taxing and horrific.”
Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October 17 counts of first degree murder; the trial must only determine whether he is sentenced to death or to life without parole.
Miami defense attorney David S. Weinstein said prosecutors hoped the visit would be “the last piece to clear any doubts a juror may have had that the death penalty is the only recommendation that can be made”.
Such visits to crime scenes are rare. Weinstein, a former prosecutor, said that in more than 150 jury trials dating back to the late 1980s, he only had one.
One reason is that it’s a logistical nightmare for the judge, who must get the jury to the scene and back to the courthouse without incident or risk a mistrial. And in a typical case, a visit wouldn’t even present true evidence. After the departure of the forces of order, the building or the public space returns to its normal use. The scene is cleaned up, objects are moved, and repairs are made. This is why judges order jurors in many trials not to go to the scene alone.
Craig Trocino, a University of Miami law professor who has represented defendants appealing their death sentences, said the visit — combined with the myriad of graphic videos and photos jurors have already seen — could open a way for Cruz’s lawyers if they find themselves in the same situation. . .
“At some point, the evidence becomes inflammatory and damaging,” he said. “Visiting the site can be a cumulative cornerstone.”
Cruz’s attorneys argued that prosecutors used evidence not just to prove their case, but to inflame jurors’ passions.
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