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Dried blood and roses: Jury gets rare look at Parkland scene

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Roses that had been brought to honor love on that Valentine’s Day in 2018 lay withered, their dried and cracked petals scattered across classroom floors still smeared with the blood of victims gunned down by a former student more than four years earlier.

Bullet holes pocked walls and shards of glass from windows shattered by gunfire crunched eerily underfoot at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where shooter Nikolas Cruz murdered 14 students and three staff members. 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 gets the death penalty or life in prison made a rare visit to the massacre scene Thursday, tracing Cruz’s steps through the three-story freshman building, known as “Building 12.” After they left, a group of journalists was allowed in for a much quicker first public view.

The sight was deeply unsettling: Large pools of dried blood still stained classroom floors. A lock of dark hair rested on the floor where one of the victims’ bodies once lay. A single black rubber shoe was in a hallway. Browned rose petals were strewn across a hallway where six people died.

In classroom after classroom, open notebooks displayed uncompleted lesson plans: A blood-coated book called “Tell Them We Remember” sat atop a bullet-riddled desk in the classroom where teacher Ivy Schamis taught students about the Holocaust. Attached to a bulletin board in the room a sign read: “We will never forget.”

In the classroom of English teacher Dara Hass, where the most students were gunned down, students had written papers about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot by the Taliban for going to school and has since been a global advocate for educational access for women and girls.

One of the students wrote: “A bullet went straight to her head but not her brain.” Another read: “We go to school every day of the week and we take it all for granted. We cry and complain without knowing how lucky we are to be able to learn.”

The door of Room 1255, teacher Stacey Lippel’s classroom, was pushed open — like others to signify that Cruz shot into it. Hanging on a wall inside was a sign reading, “No Bully Zone.” The creative writing assignment for the day was written on the whiteboard: “How to write the perfect love letter.”

And still hanging on the wall of a second-floor hallway was a quote from James Dean: “Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.”

Inside slain teacher 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 been writing the gold, silver and bronze medalists in each event at the Winter Olympics, which had begun five days earlier.

Prosecutors, who rested their case following the jury’s tour, hope the visit will help prove that Cruz’s actions were cold, calculated, heinous and cruel; created a great risk of death to 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 weren’t allowed to converse with each other — when they retraced the path Cruz followed on Feb. 14, 2018, as he methodically moved from floor to floor, firing down hallways and into classrooms as he went. Prior to the tour, the jurors had already seen surveillance video of the shooting and photographs of its aftermath.

The building has been sealed and is now surrounded by a 15-foot (4.6-meter) chain-link fence wrapped in a privacy mesh screen fastened with zip ties. It looms ominously over the school and its teachers, staff and 3,300 students, and can be seen easily by anyone nearby. The Broward County school district plans to demolish it whenever the prosecutors approve. For now, it is a court exhibit.

“When you are driving past, it’s there. When you are going to class, it’s there. It is just a colossal structure that you can’t miss,” said Kai Koerber, who was a Stoneman Douglas junior at the time of the shooting. He is now at the University of California, Berkeley, and the developer of a mental health phone app. “It is just a constant reminder… that is tremendously trying and horrible.”

Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of first-degree murder; the trial is only to determine if he is sentenced to death or life without parole.

Miami defense attorney David S. Weinstein said prosecutors hope the visit will be “the final piece in erasing any doubt that any juror might have had that the death penalty is the only recommendation that can be made.”

Such crime site visits are rare. Weinstein, a former prosecutor, said in more than 150 jury trials dating back to the late 1980s, he has only had one.

One reason is that they are a logistical nightmare for the judge, who needs to get the jury to the location and back to the courthouse without incident, or risk a mistrial. And in a typical case, a visit would not even present truthful evidence: After law enforcement leaves, the building or public space returns to its normal use. The scene gets cleaned up, objects get moved and repairs are made. It’s why judges order jurors in many trials not to visit the scene on their own.

Craig Trocino, a University of Miami law professor who has represented defendants appealing their death sentences, said the visit — combined with the myriad graphic videos and photos jurors have already seen — could open an avenue for Cruz’s attorneys if they find themselves in the same situation .

“At some point evidence becomes inflammatory and detrimental,” he said. “The site visit may be a cumulative capstone.”

Cruz’s attorneys have argued that prosecutors have used evidence not just to prove their case, but to inflame the jurors’ passions.

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Grieving father erupts at Parkland school shooter’s trial

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — A grieving father erupted in anger Tuesday as he told jurors about the daughter Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz murdered along with 16 others four years ago, his voice rising as he recounted her “infectious laugh that I can only get to watch now on TikTok videos.”

Dr. Ilan Alhadeff’s emotional testimony about his 14-year-old daughter Alyssa marked a second day of tears as families, one after another, took the witness stand to give heartrending statements about their loved ones who died at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018.

He and his wife, Lori, described Alyssa’s role as captain of her soccer team, the friend others always turned to for advice or a shoulder to cry on, and her plans to become a business lawyer. He cried as he recounted how he will not dance with his daughter de ella at her wedding de ella or see the children she would have had.

“My first-born daughter, daddy’s girl was taken from me!” yelled Alhadeff, an internal medicine physician. “I get to watch my friends, my neighbors, colleagues spend time enjoying their daughters, enjoying all the normal milestones, taking in the normal joys and I only get to watch videos or go to the cemetery to see my daughter.”

He said one of Alyssa’s two younger brothers was too young to comprehend her death when it happened, but now “asks to go see his sister at the cemetery from time to time.”

“This is not normal!” he said angrily.

Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty to 17 counts of first-degree murder in October; the trial is only to determine whether he is sentenced to death or life without parole. Over the two days of family statements, he has shown little emotion, even as several of his attorneys wiped away tears and Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer’s voice broke when she gave directions. He mostly stars straight ahead or looks down at the table where he sits.

As one family testifies, others sob in the gallery while awaiting their turn. When finished, they stay to lend support. They exchange packets of tissues, shoulder rubs and, when breaks come, hugs. Some jurors wipe away tears, but most sit stoically.

Some families had statements read for them. The mother of 14-year-old Martin Duque wrote that while he was born in Mexico, he wanted to become a US Navy Seal. The wife of assistant football coach Aaron Feis wrote that he was a doting father to their young daughter and a mentor to many young people.

The mother of 16-year-old Carmen Schentrup wrote that she was a straight-A student whose letter announcing she was a semifinalist for a National Merit Scholarship arrived the day after she died. She wanted to be a doctor who researched amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Shara Kaplan sobbed as she told the jurors of her two sons’ sadness that they weren’t there to protect their little sister, 18-year-old Meadow Pollack.

Luke Hoyer’s mom, Gina, said the 15-year-old was her “miracle baby,” her “Lukey Bear.” She said he yelled down that Valentine’s Day morning to thank her for the card and Skittles she’d placed in her bathroom. The gifts stayed there for a year. His father, Tom, said he never saw his son that morning, but he yelled up “Have a good day” as he hurried to work. “That is the kind of exchange you have when you think you have tomorrow,” he said.

Fred Guttenberg, who has become a national advocate for tighter gun laws, said he regrets that the last words he said to his 14-year-old daughter Jaime weren’t “I love you” but instead, “You gotta go, you are going to be late” as he pushed her and her older brother out the door that morning. He said his son is angry with him for telling him to run when he called in a panic to say there was a gunman at the school instead of having him find his sister, even though it would have made no difference.

His wife, Jennifer Guttenberg, said that while her daughter was known for her competitive dancing, she volunteered with the Humane Society and with special needs children. She planned to be a pediatric physical therapist.

Annika Dworet, her husband Mitch sitting somberly at her side, told the jurors about their son Nick, who was 17 when he died. A star swimmer, he had accepted a scholarship to the University of Indianapolis and was training in hopes of competing for his mother’s native Sweden in the 2020 Olympics. His younger brother of him, Alex, was wounded in the shooting.

“He was always inclusive of everyone. On his last evening with us, he spent time speaking to the younger kids on the swim team, giving them some pointers,” she said.

But now, she said, “our hearts will forever be broken.”

“We will always live with excruciating pain. We have an empty bedroom in our house. There is an empty chair at our dining table. Alex will never have a brother to talk or hang out with. They will never again go for a drive, blasting very loud music. We did not get to see Nick graduate from high school or college. We will never see him getting married.

“We will always hesitate before answering the question, ‘How many kids do you have?’”

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