Cruz was 19 years old when he used an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle to carry out the attack at his former school. He fired 140 shots during the seven-minute assault, which he had planned for seven months. He pleaded guilty last year.
Last month, a 12-member jury delivered a unanimous verdict recommending that Cruz be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He had been facing the death penalty, but the jury did not reach the unanimity required under state law for that sentence to be imposed.
For each of the 17 counts, the jurors found existence of all aggravating factors — including that the murders were carried out in a “cold, calculated and premeditated” manner — but that they did not outweigh mitigating circumstances established by the defense.
Cruz’s lawyers had claimed his birth mother’s excessive drinking and drug use during pregnancy left him with “fetal alcohol spectrum disorder” that ultimately led him to carry out the school shooting, one of the deadliest in U.S. history.
It was the deadliest mass shooting that has ever gone to trial in the United States.
Nine other people in the U.S. who fatally shot at least 17 people died during or immediately after their attacks by suicide or police gunfire, according to the Associated Press. The suspect in the 2019 massacre of 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, is currently awaiting trial.
“The legal system should protect and impart justice, justice, justice,” Patricia Oliver, whose 17-year-old son Joaquin was killed in Parkland, said in court Tuesday. “If this, the worst mass shooting to go to trial, does not deserve the death penalty, what does?”
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