FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Jurors in the penalty trial of Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz saw evidence Wednesday of his growing obsession to commit a massacre, seeing internet posts and searches about mass killings in the months before he murdered 17 people at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
In an emotionless monotone, Broward County sheriff’s Detective Nick Masters read hundreds of searches and comments Cruz made starting seven months before the Feb. 14, 2018, massacre as prosecutors try to prove he planned it.
They included searches about the mass shootings at Columbine High School in 1999, a movie theater in the Denver suburbs in 2012, Virginia Tech University in 2007, a South Carolina Black church in 2015 and a Las Vegas country music concert in 2017.
In comments, Cruz praised Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in 2014 before taking his own life and has become a touchstone among disturbed young men who identify as “involuntary celibates” or “incels” because women won’t date them.
In posts on YouTube, Cruz wrote “I wanna kill people,” “I’m going to be a professional school shooter,” “I have no problem shooting a girl in the chest” and “No mercy.” He wrote “It makes me happy to see people die” followed by a smiley face emoji and “I love to see the familys suffer.”
About two months before his attack, Cruz turned his focus toward Stoneman Douglas, the school he periodically attended before he was expelled in early 2017. He researched the school’s operating hours and pulled up a campus map.
Finally, less than 24 hours before the massacre, he searched for, “How long does it take a cop to show up at a school shooting?” He fled the school after seven minutes.
Some of the seven men and five women on the jury and their 10 alternates scribbled madly as Cruz’s words were posted on video screens in front of them. Victims’ parents and family members in the gallery audibly gasped as they saw the posts, with some shaking their heads.
Under questioning by Cruz’s attorney, Masters said all the posts were in public forums and many under his own name. He said that, to his knowledge, Google and YouTube had no method for locating and reporting such posts and searches.
Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty to 17 counts of first-degree murder in October, meaning the jury will decide only whether he is sentenced to death or life without parole. The shooting left 14 students, a teacher, the athletic director and…
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