Several swastikas were used in a vain effort to prevent the admission of evidence. At his sentencing hearing on Thursday, Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz’s defenders made an uncommon claim: He was an equal opportunity murderer who shot his victims without regard to their ethnicity or religion.
Since there is no proof that the murder of 17 people at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in 2018 was motivated by hatred, the lawyers persuaded Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer outside the jury’s presence that allowing the panel to view those drawings would violate his right to a fair trial. White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian individuals as well as Christians and Jews were among the 17 injured and the 17 slain.
They also detailed all the times they requested Scherer to decide whether the swastikas would be allowed before jury selection, claiming that her denial had an impact on the questions they planned to ask potential jurors and their trial strategy. They requested a mistrial, which Scherer vehemently denied and labeled as “disingenuous.”
She and the prosecution made the point that the defense was not opposed to the admission of Cruz’s drawings, which they argued were as obscene and included a crude insult used against Black people. White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic persons are among the 12 jurors and 10 alternates.
Cruz, 23, pled guilty in October; the only issue that will be decided at trial is whether or not he would get a death sentence. To condemn someone to death, the jury must reach a consensus.
The defense provided the English assignments with the swastikas written on them; they requested that the symbols be blacked out while leaving the other problematic images in tact. The attorneys nevertheless provided the assignments after Scherer denied their request to remove the swastikas. The swastikas were visible to the jury, but neither side called them out.
Carrie Yon, who taught Cruz in the eighth grade at Westglades Middle School four years prior to the massacre, assigned the homework. Cruz had previously been placed in special education courses due to his behavioral issues, but he was now permitted to attend certain regular classes, including Yon’s.
Yon testified Thursday she usually returned a student’s material, but kept Cruz’s because she wanted to document his behavior thinking it might be needed at some point. She also made contemporaneous notes. She turned the material over to the lawyers after the shootings.
On assignments shown in court Thursday, Cruz wrote obscenities and gay slurs and drew photos of stick figures shooting each other and having sex. He once wrote to Yon, “I hate you. I hate America.”
She said Cruz would yell in class, flash his middle fingers, throw objects and make threats. He once told her “You better give me a good grade on this assignment” and another time lunged at her and then laughed. He hit other children during one fire drill and ran into the street in another, almost getting struck by a car.
She tried working with Cruz by giving him candy and compliments when he behaved. One time, she praised him for doing his assignment, telling him she knew he could be a good student. He replied, “I’m a bad kid. I want to kill.”
On one assessment, Yon wrote, “I strongly feel Nikolas is a danger to the students and faculty at this school. He does not understand the difference between his violent feelings and reality.”
She said she originally thought Cruz wanted attention from teachers and other students, but eventually believed he wanted to get kicked out of Westglades because he had no friends and couldn’t do the work.
She frequently complained about Cruz to administrators and showed them his assignments, but some were not helpful. She said one told her, “He has a right to an education. He has a right to be here like any other kid.”
A special education teacher told Yon she was too fearful of Cruz, that she needed to “get in his face” and tell him, “Hit me, go ahead and hit me.” She refused to do that.
When asked if in her 12 years as a teacher if she ever had another student who acted like Cruz, she had a simple response.
“No.”
John Vesey, the then-Westglades principal, said in 35 years in education he also never had another student like Cruz.
“He was a much more needy kid than any kid I had ever seen,” Vesey said.
Before the end of eighth grade, Cruz was sent to a school, Cross Creek, that is for students with emotional and disciplinary problems. Cruz did relatively well there, which allowed him to eventually attend Stoneman Douglas. He was expelled from there a year before the shooting.
Vesey said success at Cross Creek is not necessarily predictive that a student like Cruz will succeed at a school like Stoneman Douglas with more than 3,000 students.
Cross Creek is “150 kids with support built in and you can make sure they are much more medication compliant,” Vesey said.
Vesey wishes he had warned Stoneman Douglas administrators about Cruz before he arrived.
“I feel very guilty about it,” he said.