Saturday, Oct. 15, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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He killed 17 and injured 17 more. And still, monster Nikolas Jacob Cruz, 24, gets to live.
Life in prison without parole was a Broward County jury’s stunning and, under Florida law, binding recommendation.
On the worst Valentine’s Day in American history, this former student indulged his obsession with guns and unleashed his demons on innocent teenagers and three educators at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He would have killed more, but he didn’t want to risk getting caught — or dying in a gun battle with police.
Yes, he wanted to live. So he discarded the weapon and cunningly used the terrified students fleeing from the rapid rounds of his AR-15 rifle as cover to get away.
Then, the mass killer returned to re-shoot wounded victims like beloved wrestling coach and athletic director Chris Hixon, husband and father to a special-needs son.
And still, he gets to live.
“It feels like his life is more valuable than Christopher’s — and that’s not true,” said the coach’s widow, educator Debbi Hixon.
Looking stoic or engaging with his lawyers for most of the sentencing trial, he was still plotting a favorable outcome, even as a jury heard heart-wrenching testimony for three months.
A psychologist said Cruz still knows what he’s doing. He sought to fool those tasked with delivering justice by exaggerating his alleged disability to comprehend on a mental capacity test.
But, reporters were told, none of these things swayed at least one juror, who stood firm against Florida’s death penalty from the start. And a new sentencing law, adopted by the Legislature in 2017 with the good intention of keeping an innocent person from being executed, requires a unanimous death recommendation by the jury before the judge can impose the sentence.
And so, the system, too, ends up protecting the killer and fails his victims. So what if Cruz had a tough upbringing by adoptive parents and a criminal birth mother? Others, including his brother, did, too, and they don’t kill.
The victims, on the other hand, didn’t get a chance to present “mitigating factors” to spare their lives.
Parents are rightfully asking: Why was Cruz’s troubled life considered more valuable to preserve than those he took?
“Prior to the shooting, the Parkland murderer said he wanted to kill 20 people,” tweeted father Max Schachter after jurors rejected the death penalty. “He stopped after killing 17 including my sweet boy Alex. Afterwards he didn’t want to die. He wanted to live. Today he got everything he wanted. While our loved ones are in the cemetery.”
In other words, no justice has been served. Only a pile-on of grief for relatives, friends, and a community that finds it all inexplicable.
There’s no second chance for the victims, whose lives were cut oh-so short. There’s no solace for parents like Gena Hoyer, who held on to the photo of her son, Luke, 15, during the protracted sentencing.
Nor for the relentless gun control advocate Fred Guttenberg, who bowed his head, clenched his fingers and, no doubt, will continue his admirable crusade to keep other parents from losing their children like he did his lovely 14-year-old daughter Jaime.
The jury’s recommendation of life in prison is so hard to understand.
Why was the killer of Jimmy Ryce, the sweet 9-year-old boy who disappeared from a South Miami-Dade school bus stop in 1995, brought to justice — and executed by lethal injection in 2014 — yet Cruz, who gunned down so many showing no mercy or remorse, gets to spend his life in prison, reading, watching television, eating three meals a day?
Jimmy’s killer, Juan Carlos Chavez, 28, was a Cuban rafter who forced Jimmy into his car at gunpoint. He took the child to a trailer and raped him. He would then shoot him, take him apart and bury him among planters.
It is valid to question the existence of Florida’s death penalty and the ethics of what may seem like eye-for-an-eye retribution and revenge to some. I, in my mind and heart, do so all the time. I supported putting Chavez to death, and I thought it was appropriate for Cruz to bring closure to the families and to send the right message in a country racked by gun violence.
If we are going to choose between life in prison and death, why isn’t this kind of justice delivered with more consistency of outcome?
What makes one sick killer more worthy of compassion than another?
No, don’t ask for respect, jurors. I, the mother of teachers, one of them who knew Hixon and worked with his wife, have none for this school shooting verdict.
Cruz deserved the death penalty.
Fabiola Santiago is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
