In the summer of 1998, Brenda Woodard and Carolyn Deakins were two of the dozens of women selling sex on the streets of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was a desperate scene down by the 17th Street Causeway, the first bridge into the city from its south. The johns, many of them fresh arrivals from the nearby airport, would swing off U.S. 1, and conduct their business in cars along Miami Road.
The two women spent the money they made almost exclusively on drink and drugs. Carolyn drank nothing but Busch beer, a 12-pack at a time. Brenda bought two cans of Colt 45, poured them into a Big Gulp cup from 7-Eleven and nursed the malt liquor until it was time to refill it. In truth, the Big Gulp was never really empty.
Unlike many of the women working U.S. 1, Brenda had an apartment: a crash pad with nothing more than a refrigerator, stove and mattress. The two women did not live together, but Brenda’s spartan place was a hangout. They did not bother with food; Brenda traded the steaks she was good at stealing from local supermarkets for more drugs. She and Carolyn would fire up their crack pipes and escape their lives for a bit. Then, it was back out to Miami Road. Carolyn said she once went 12 days straight without sleep.
Fort Lauderdale in the late 1990s — if not quite the violent outpost it had been in the days of the Cocaine Cowboys — could be rough enough still. One night, Carolyn was abducted by a john, bound and gagged with duct tape, and dumped near the airport. She had to scooch and drag herself to safety, but as she would later recount, she simply picked the gravel out of her rear end and returned to work.
In the apartment one day, Carolyn found Brenda vomiting into the toilet. She figured Brenda was dopesick, and handed her a rock of crack. Brenda pushed it away.
“Bitch, I’m pregnant,” Carolyn recalled Brenda saying.
Carolyn, high herself, nonetheless understood the gravity of the situation. The drinking, the drugging — you can’t do that to the baby, she said she told Brenda.
Brenda was unmoved.
“This baby’s bought and paid for,” she said.
Brenda had given birth to a girl a decade earlier, and had two abortions since. She had told some people this latest pregnancy had resulted from her being raped, but she did not want to end it. Instead, she found an ad for an adoption agency in a Penny Pincher magazine. She contracted with the agency to give the baby over upon birth. An older couple in the affluent city of Parkland, northwest of Fort Lauderdale, had given the agency thousands of dollars for Brenda during the pregnancy, with the agreement the baby would be theirs. That money had paid for the apartment where Brenda got drunk and for the doctor appointments meant to monitor her pregnancy. Brenda had someone else submit their urine so she would pass drug tests.
When Brenda and Carolyn were arrested later that summer for possession of crack, Carolyn was sent to prison. The adoptive couple’s money, however, allowed Brenda to be bonded out. When she later delivered the baby, the infant boy was sent straight from the hospital to their well-to-do home in Parkland. In total, Brenda had received roughly $20,000.
Two decades later, Kate O’Shea needed to find Brenda. O’Shea was a member of a legal defense team working a notorious murder case. She had a hunch Brenda held critical information. O’Shea had dug up Brenda’s criminal record, including a mugshot, and eventually found her smoking a cigarette in a lawn chair outside a public housing complex in Dania Beach, just down the coast from Fort Lauderdale.
Brenda had gotten sober, but life was no less hard. She had terminal metastatic breast cancer and lived in a bleak apartment with a roommate named Big Baby, a physically imposing and domineering woman. Brenda had to put locks on the cabinets to prevent Big Baby from taking her food. Brenda’s bloated feet were often cracked with open wounds; in front of O’Shea, she once used a Lysol wipe to address the wounds, but only after cleaning her shoes with the wipe first.
O’Shea was well respected in Florida for her skill in reconstructing the lives of defendants facing serious charges. She was meticulously organized and completely fearless, and she had an authentic warmth that got witnesses to trust her. She also had her own unorthodox backstory — a one-time motorcycle mechanic and roller derby star with a history of self-destructive behavior and recovery.
Yet nothing had quite prepared O’Shea for what she had to tell Brenda.
O’Shea’s client was Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who, months earlier on Valentine’s Day 2018, shot dead 17 people and wounded another 17 at his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, in Parkland. The dead included five 14-year-olds, an accomplished Irish dancer among them; a beloved wrestling coach; a 17-year-old newly naturalized citizen from Venezuela; a student volunteer with the local Church of Latter-day Saints congregation; a trombonist from the school’s marching band; a National Merit Scholar; a 15-year-old excited to celebrate the Chinese New Year; an aspiring lawyer; a geography teacher shot dead while opening a door for kids to escape through.
Their killer, O’Shea informed Brenda, was the baby boy she had given up in 1998, and he was facing the death penalty. O’Shea was among a handful of lawyers and investigators trying to see his life spared.
The cigarette fell out of Brenda’s mouth, and she screamed.
Before tracking Brenda down, O’Shea had begun to sort through Cruz’s vast documentary record — school reports, psychological testing, run-ins with the law. He’d been identified as odd or ill or both from the time he was a toddler: socially isolated, intellectually challenged, obsessed with guns and violent video games, explosively aggressive, desperate for friends and their approval. Cops had been called to the house in Parkland; the FBI had been warned; Cruz under his own name had posted a comment on a YouTube video declaring himself a “professional school shooter”; a teacher had kept records for fear they might be useful if Cruz wound up doing something terrible.
O’Shea had found references throughout the paperwork declaring Cruz was autistic. But early examinations after the massacre in Parkland had cast doubt on that diagnosis. One expert hired by the defense emerged from an evaluation of Cruz confused and shaken, asking the defense team, “What the fuck was that?” He was at a loss for a diagnosis for the profoundly damaged human being he’d just seen, but he said it was not autism.
Cruz’s defense team suspected his brain might have been poisoned in utero. Research over the last half-century had identified and documented the effects of maternal drinking. Alcohol and the toxins it created in the womb could kill cells that form the brain. The harm was often grave; it was always irreversible.
O’Shea needed Brenda to tell her about the pregnancy.
Brenda, in a series of conversations with O’Shea, had no problem describing the dark days of 1998. She sold sex, yes; she smoked crack, and got arrested for it. But she was reluctant to talk about drinking. Her alcoholism held a special shame. She told O’Shea she’d been raped by her father as a child, and had been haunted by the smell of the cheap whiskey on his breath. The hospital records from when Brenda gave birth to Cruz, however, showed she had checked a box acknowledging she was an alcoholic. O’Shea needed the details.
Finally, the story of Brenda’s drinking came out. Malt liquor, fortified wine — she said she’d been drunk virtually every day of the first eight months of the pregnancy. When she was done, Brenda, shocked by the news about her son and regretful for her drinking, asked if she might see Nikolas, and agreed to work with his defense team.
“I’ll do whatever I can,” O’Shea recalled her pledging.
What began with a dying woman in a public housing project south of Fort Lauderdale would become one of the nation’s longest of longshot bids for mercy. School shooters — in Columbine, Colorado; Sandy Hook, Connecticut; Uvalde, Texas — typically kill themselves or are shot dead by police. They seldom see a courtroom. Nikolas Cruz, though, was taken alive, and while he would plead guilty to each of the 17 murders, prosecutors wanted him executed. And so the question of his punishment would go before a jury, making him the rampage killer with the greatest number of victims to ever stand trial.
In 2022, more than four years after the killings in Parkland, prosecutors successfully convinced the jury that Cruz’s acts were premeditated, fully planned and strategically carried out. He’d taken an Uber ride to the school that afternoon, hunted down his victims, and returned to finish off others after he’d first wounded them. He escaped the school along with the fleeing students, went to a local Subway shop, had an ICEE, and later sat at a nearby McDonald’s with the unwitting brother of one of the children he’d just shot.
He was the worst of the worst, prosecutors argued, and just the sort of irredeemable person for whom the death penalty existed.
The defense did not dispute Cruz’s guilt, nor excuse the devastation he’d wrought. Their job was to investigate, and then tell, the history of his life so that the jury, thus informed, might sentence him to life behind bars rather than execution. His brain had been impaired before he was born, they argued. The damage from his mother’s drinking had gone undiagnosed throughout his 19 years. He should have his freedom taken forever, without question. But he had a story to tell, and the jury needed to hear it. In the end, the defense only needed one juror to vote for life without the possibility of parole, since in Florida at that time the jury had to be unanimous for death to be imposed.
“Bad facts.” In the vernacular of capital punishment, defense lawyers often refer to the horrific crimes committed by their clients as a case’s “bad facts.” The facts don’t get much worse than what happened in Parkland, and that was hardly the only challenge for Cruz’s defense team.
Since 1976, Florida has executed more people than all but three other states. The families of the dead in Parkland, shattered and enraged, wanted Cruz to pay with his life, and blessed the prosecution’s decision to see that price paid. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was preparing to run for president and under attack from the right for not signing enough execution warrants for those on Florida’s death row, stood with the Parkland families.
In the past six years, the Parkland tragedy has given rise to revelatory reporting and legislative action; it has led to personal and probing books, and shaped lives of advocacy and newfound purpose. But the defense team has not spoken with the news media. Instead, their story of discovery, hardship and success has been shared chiefly with their families and other capital case defense lawyers.
In exploring Cruz’s dysfunctional journey from birth to mass murderer — talking with classmates and neighbors, relatives, teachers and counselors, police and doctors — the team would have to navigate a community whose every corner had been touched and traumatized by the events of Feb. 14, 2018. Such was the nature and scope of the carnage in Parkland. School officials and responding officers were the subjects of withering criticism for their failure to act decisively during Cruz’s spectacularly disturbed life as a student, and on the day of the massacre itself. Two students who survived Cruz’s bloody assault later killed themselves.
“He was a weapon of mass destruction,” Joel Maney, a member of Cruz’s defense team, said of him. “People think there are just 34 victims — 17 of whom are deceased and 17 more who are injured. But his tentacles are far-reaching, to the point where I don’t even think they can be measured.”
On Sept. 4, the reach of the harm done by Cruz was given a disturbing new measure when a 14-year-old boy shot dead two fellow students and two teachers at a high school in Georgia. Initial news reports said the teenager, Colt Gray, had researched and written about other school shootings, including the one in Parkland.
Gray is set to be tried as an adult, but because of his age, prosecutors can’t seek his execution. Still, lawyers for Gray, just like those who represented Cruz, will be obligated by both the law and their own consciences to do the work of reconstructing the boy’s life, which early on appears to have included a turbulent home, mental health struggles and missed opportunities to intervene before disaster struck. That work, whether it wins some degree of leniency for the child or not, will certainly contribute to understanding the tragedy.
The experience of Cruz’s defense team suggests that work will take its own terrible toll.
Over their four years of work, the team’s members had doors slammed in their faces, received police protection for their own safety, and spent days in what was called the 1200 Building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the classrooms and hallways where the massacre had happened. It had been preserved in all its bloodiness and brain matter for the jury to walk through. They would have to spend hour upon hour reviewing autopsy photographs, virtually every one of which the prosecution wanted entered into evidence. They would need to serve subpoenas to people who never wanted to think about the tragedy again, much less testify in public.
At trial, Cruz’s defense team faced a judge openly hostile to their efforts. The judge, a former Broward County prosecutor who had worked for the very office that was seeking Cruz’s execution, had never before overseen a capital case, and she ruled against the defense at almost every turn. She would later be formally reprimanded for her conduct in the case by the Florida Supreme Court and resign from the bench.
At the end, their work complete, the team would be vilified by the families of the lost. One by one, parents of the children and teachers called for their disbarment, told them they had no conscience, warned that their days ahead would be filled with shame for what they had done in defending Cruz and fear for what might happen to them.
The team included Melisa McNeill, a veteran Broward County public defender and mother of two; Casey Secor, a graduate of a law school ranked third-worst in the country, who nonetheless had become a gifted and passionate capital defense lawyer; Maney, an ex-cop in Fort Lauderdale, who once arrested Brenda Woodard, and who would have over 100 visits — more than any other team member — with her incarcerated son; and O’Shea, a newlywed who would, in looking for witnesses, go door to door through an inconsolable Broward County community.
The four would not escape the damage done by Cruz. O’Shea’s husband, married to her the very weekend she signed onto the team, worried he’d lost the dogged and hopeful woman he’d said his vows to; Maney wound up self-medicating with alcohol; Secor’s friends and family encouraged him to seek in-patient mental health care, alarmed by his anger and depression after years immersed in the details of children’s senseless deaths.
None of them, to be sure, are looking for sympathy. The suffering that needs to be honored, they are vigilant in saying, is that borne by the victim families. The team took the case with their eyes wide open and their minds at peace with the idea that Cruz was entitled to the best possible defense. Anything less, they argued, would only invite appeals that might retraumatize the hundreds of surviving children in Parkland and force the victim families to endure more hearings, maybe another trial and additional days in the same courtroom as the young man who had torn their lives apart.
Amid all the hatred and setbacks, the team would dig in and carry on, becoming experts at brain science, and having Kenneth Lyons Jones, one of the first doctors to discover the variety of disorders caused by fetal exposure to alcohol, testify at trial.
They would achieve surprising breakthroughs in their inquiry into the life and mind of Nikolas Cruz, tracking down a former principal who had never appeared on anyone’s witness list, and who would defy what he felt was intimidation from the prosecution to testify that Cruz was so troubled he never should have been admitted as a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
They would witness courage, such as when Brenda’s first child, a daughter named Danielle, put herself in legal jeopardy in order to give sworn testimony about her mother’s drinking.
And they would, in watching Carolyn take the witness stand, experience genuine moments of grace. Carolyn, who after the 1998 arrests had recovered her sobriety and dedicated her life to working with at-risk women, would give an unvarnished account of her time on the streets with Brenda, the worst days of her life. She wept, repeatedly had to catch her breath, and apologized to Cruz for the lives she and his mother had lived.
In the end, the defense would prevail. Three of 12 jurors voted for life imprisonment without the chance at parole.
“That kid was not born with a typical brain,” said one of the three jurors. “How can we execute someone like that?”
That every defendant, no matter the seriousness of the crime, is owed a robust defense is a bedrock principle of America’s criminal legal system. It is a just and even noble promise. But for those who deliver on that promise, making the case for mercy can sometimes be absolute hell.
For Cruz’s defense team, their hard but essential work would come with what felt like a demoralizing twist. Florida legislators, upset that Cruz had been spared execution, acted to require that the votes of only eight of 12 jurors would be needed to recommend a death sentence. The irony was not lost on the team: Their success in a single case meant more defendants in the years to come would be sentenced to die.
O’Shea first heard about the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when news of it broke on local Florida media. Heartbroken, she got scared when she learned the son of a lawyer she’d worked with for years had been at the school.
It turned out the young boy was safe, but when O’Shea found out the killer had been taken into custody alive, she began to worry for herself. In her gut, she was sure she’d be called to work the case. She did not want to.
O’Shea is what is called a mitigation specialist, typically a layperson who is tasked with researching the lives of defendants at risk of execution in the hopes the circumstances of their lives — poverty, mental illness, victimization — might be grounds for mercy to be shown. The requirement that such work be done in death penalty cases had been enshrined in a host of U.S. Supreme Court cases, the foundational language coming in a 1978 case, Lockett v. Ohio, in which a 21-year-old woman had been sentenced to death for her role in the fatal robbery of a pawn shop.
“The Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the justices wrote, “require that the sentencer, in all but the rarest kind of capital case, not be precluded from considering as a mitigating factor, any aspect of a defendant's character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than death.”
From the start, O’Shea’s work investigating the backgrounds of those guilty of terrible crimes was shaped and colored by her own life: her struggles to overcome an absent father, fight self-harm and find purpose before it was too late.
Born in Princeton, New Jersey, O’Shea, 41, grew up part brilliant rebel and part wayward delinquent. She could be counted on to get straight As, and to just as surely get high after school, getting her hands on any drugs she could. She wound up as good with her hands as she was with her head, and she became obsessed with motorcycles, riding and fixing them, and ultimately fleeing New Jersey for Florida to attend the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute in Orlando, where she specialized in Harley-Davidsons and subsisted on $4.99 breakfast buffets.
After graduating, and struggling to find steady work as a woman in the predominantly male world of motorcycles, she began to take on research assignments from her mom, a one-time public defender who had gone into private practice as a criminal defense lawyer.
Piecing together the stories of people’s lives proved to be more interesting than reassembling Harley engines. She got a degree in psychology, with an emphasis on criminal justice. One of her early jobs involved a case in Liberty City, a tough corner of Miami. A White woman looking for witnesses in a largely African American community, it took a while for her to refine her approach for earning acceptance and trust.
O’Shea came to call her interviewing technique “compassionate listening.” She wasn’t there to scare or entrap witnesses. She wanted to empower them — relatives, teachers, friends, law enforcement — to tell their truths about her clients.
“I haven’t met somebody that is just a murderer for the sake of being a murderer,” O’Shea said. “I don’t know that that person even exists.”
Justice requires that a defendant, whatever the nature and scope of their crimes, gets what they deserve. Mercy is something different, O’Shea believes. It is an act of grace, separate from the notion of justice.
“Mercy is a gift that is defined by the giver and has little to do with the worthiness of the recipient,” she said. “Bestowing mercy does not mean that a person should be free from consequences.”
To grant mercy, she said, requires a certain letting go of vengeance and retribution, however understandably felt. Doing so can be liberating to those who give it.
“Anger is a burden on the soul,” she said.
What scared her about the Parkland case, then, wasn’t the obscenity of the crime.
It was the specter of such a high-profile case — reporters and television cameras and the loss of her anonymity. She enjoyed working behind the scenes, offstage, as a forager for critical information and insights on cases most everyone had forgotten.
O’Shea understood that her life would be forever changed by saying yes to the Parkland case when the call finally came. And so she sought out people who might tell her it was OK to say no. She talked with her husband, mom, therapist, the legion of lawyers she’d worked alongside over the years.
She happened to be at her goddaughter’s birthday party when Melisa McNeill, the Broward County public defender representing Cruz, called. McNeill was at a child’s birthday party as well. The two women, surrounded by children blessed to be alive and safe in a world of often terrible and random violence, talked for several minutes.
O’Shea said yes.
O’Shea would log 5,000 hours exploring Cruz’s life in a shocked and grieving Broward County, going door to door on streets adorned with stickers, posters and flags declaring “MSD Strong.”
She conducted several of these interviews alongside Joel Maney, a defense team member who had worked as a Broward County cop for 35 years. One day, O’Shea and Maney arrived on the porch of a girl who had been Cruz’s classmate. Students they had interviewed earlier had told them they’d made repeated oral and written reports to school officials about Cruz’s disturbing behavior: He talked about blood and guns, was inappropriate with girls and threatening to boys. He’d once introduced himself to a freshman student as “NSS: Nik, the School Shooter.”
Perhaps, then, this girl might have something important to share. At the door, they met the girl’s mother. They introduced themselves. Furious, the mother pointed at a house across the street where she said a 14-year-old boy from the Parkland high school lived, saying the boy had already gone to four funerals for classmates. Then, the mother pointed at a woman walking by pushing a stroller. The woman’s daughter, O’Shea and Maney were told, had to sit in a CSI tent at the school the day of the shooting to have brain matter taken out of her hair.
O’Shea and Maney were told to get the hell off the porch.
Yet some doors would be opened to O’Shea, and inside she would find information of consequence. Jack Vesey had been the principal at Westglades Middle School, where Cruz had a frightening and problematic start to eighth grade. Daycare providers, parents of playmates, a psychiatrist who had seen Cruz as a 3-year-old — all had noted their mystification and alarm about the boy, his intellectual deficits and inability to socialize. O’Shea had got to them all, or seen the reports they had made on Cruz.
However, Vesey had seemed to slip through the cracks. The prosecution had not included him in its voluminous list of potential witnesses for trial. O’Shea thought it worth a shot, and showed up at his house, only to see “MSD Strong” stickers on a front window.
“At least this will be quick, then,” she said to herself.
She was shocked when Vesey opened the door. He had spent parts of his career working in specialized schools in Broward County, places that protected and nurtured the most challenging children. He had worked for months during Cruz’s eighth-grade year to get him placed in such a school. Cruz had terrorized teachers and students — obsessively drawing stick figures killing each other, penises, racial slurs and swastikas, and disrupting class with pleas for the teachers to talk about guns. He’d been assigned an adult monitor who would remove him from class when his behavior became too much.
Carrie Yon, one of his teachers, kept her own log of his behavior and copies of what he wrote and drew, in addition to what she also filled out for the school. She was worried for Cruz, and in fear of him.
Contains sensitive content, tap to reveal
Her notes showed a disturbing catalog of alarming behavior: He’d imitate masturbating or giving blow jobs; he brought a crowbar to class; he wanted to know what Abraham Lincoln’s assassination sounded like.
“Did people eat the Civil War dead?” he once asked.
“I’m a bad kid. I want to kill,” he announced one day. “Life is shit; all it brings is pain and death.”
“How am I still at this school?” he asked another time.
Yon’s notes show she asked the same question, suggesting Cruz needed to be in a locked facility.
“I feel strongly that Nikolas is a danger to the students and faculty at this school,” Yon wrote in her school notes. “I do not feel that he understands the difference between his violent video games and reality.”
Yon testified that she made an extra copy of her records to keep because she “did not want them to disappear,” and indeed, O’Shea said those records were not among the 3,000 pages of material turned over to the defense by Cruz’s schools. When Yon testified at trial, she would only do it by video; she could not be in the same courtroom as Cruz.
In the open door of Jack Vesey’s home, O’Shea told the principal, Yon’s former boss, that she represented Cruz, and his help could be important.
“I’ve been waiting so long for someone to come talk to me,” he told her.
Vesey said he had been able to get Cruz placed in an appropriate school, Cross Creek, for the second half of his eighth-grade year. Cruz had done better there. But then, at his adoptive mother’s encouragement, Cruz was permitted to enroll at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Cruz had called Cross Creek “the retard school.” His mother hated the stigma she felt with him there. Stoneman Douglas was a big, high-achieving high school, full of accomplished and ambitious children from the county’s better-off families.
When he learned of Cruz’s placement at Stoneman Douglas, Vesey said, “That can’t be right. He can’t go to Douglas.” He blames himself for not having intervened more aggressively.
“They didn’t believe me when I told them how sick he was,” he said of school district officials.
On the morning he testified at trial, Vesey was contacted by a school district official and one of the prosecutors. They wanted to talk about his testimony, he said. Vesey testified that he felt it was an effort to silence him or soften what he might say, and he swore out an affidavit saying so. The prosecution denied anything nefarious, and the defense team’s bid for a mistrial was denied by the judge.
To document Cruz’s sickness, from birth on, O’Shea needed to start at the beginning: his adoption by a couple named Roger and Lynda Cruz.
Roger and Lynda had each been married before. Lynda had been abandoned by her own mother when she was 3 years old. She’d been discovered with her infant brother — the boy stuck in a dresser drawer — along with a note saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” Lynda had long been Roger’s woman on the side, suffering miscarriages after becoming pregnant by him, and twice terminating additional pregnancies while he promised to someday end his marriage.
When he did, at last, Roger and Lynda moved from New York to Florida, into a spacious home in Parkland. Lynda was desperate for a child, but by now, at 49, likely too old for an easy pregnancy. The adoption records show Lynda had initially declared she did not want a Black child nor a disabled one, and that the couple had agreed to adopt a different child than Nikolas before that deal fell apart. Lynda and Roger ultimately entered an agreement with Brenda to raise her child when it was born.
O’Shea said the records obtained by the defense team make it clear Roger and Lynda were aware of the life Brenda was leading. They set up a kind of trust account, and out of it paid Brenda’s bills — to get her car repaired or rent paid, or her bond posted when she was arrested. Brenda had called the adoption agency from jail, complaining she was sleeping on the floor and being mistreated.
The records O’Shea obtained and analyzed show Brenda had failed to gain weight during the pregnancy, a sign she was eating poorly while fueling her addictions. Brenda had passed periodic drug tests after her arrest by submitting her young daughter’s urine instead of her own. The deception didn’t last, and she eventually failed a test and wound up in rehab, where she was visited by Lynda.
A year after Nikolas was given over to them, the couple contracted with Brenda for a second child, a boy named Zachary. Zachary would escape Brenda’s trouble with alcohol, because she was behind bars for most of the pregnancy.
When O’Shea tracked Brenda down in Dania Beach, Brenda told her that she had never known either of the boys after she gave them up for adoption. But then, she produced a photograph of Nikolas and Zachary that she had been given. Somehow, despite bouts of homelessness and imprisonment, Brenda had held onto it for close to two decades. O’Shea later arranged for an ailing Brenda to have a video visit with her imprisoned son. Having Brenda visit him in person would have risked a media firestorm and perhaps backlash from the families of those Cruz had killed: “Mass killer gets to see birth mom.”
Because Brenda had no Wi-Fi in her housing project apartment, O’Shea rented a motel room, and the visit happened on O’Shea’s laptop.
Brenda had been told Cruz loved dogs, so she brought along hers, a tiny scrappy little thing named Scotty. Cruz talked about Lynda, his adoptive mother, and told Brenda he wished he had known her, his birth mother. She had led a damaging life; he had committed an unthinkable atrocity. They expressed love for each other.
“It was as beautiful a thing as Nik could muster,” O’Shea said of the meeting.
Brenda looked like hell, O’Shea said, and at one point had to move from a chair to a couch.
“And even Nik, as much as he doesn't perceive things,” O’Shea recalled, “when I went to see him afterward, he was like, ‘She's dying, isn't she?’ I said, ‘Well, I don't know, but it does seem that way.’”
Brenda succumbed to cancer before the 2022 trial. She had a deathbed phone conversation with Cruz, but she would not be a witness at trial. The defense team scrambled to get a doctor to sign an affidavit declaring that her illness was so grave her testimony should be recorded, but her decline was rapid. She was in hospice care, on morphine and incoherent, before the document could be legally produced and the testimony taken.
O’Shea needed to corroborate Brenda’s drinking another way.
O’Shea had already found Danielle, Brenda’s daughter, convicted and in prison for an attack on a police officer. She’d had her own demons and disasters. During the summer of 1998, Danielle, then 11, had been living with her grandmother. But she recalled a day she had spent with Brenda that included a stop at a filling station food mart in Fort Lauderdale, right across from the women in crisis shelter. Danielle said she had a vivid memory of her mother’s car, piled with garbage, one of its back windows shattered, the glass from it on the car floor.
Danielle told O’Shea that Brenda came out of the store with a bottle of grape Cisco fortified wine in a brown paper bag. She drank from it as she pumped gas, and Danielle could see Brenda’s baby bump. In an affidavit, Danielle recounted what happened next.
“I asked if she was pregnant. She said she was raped, took another swig, put the bottle between her legs, turned up the radio, and then we drove off.”
To see if she could trust Danielle’s memory, O’Shea dug through the receipts of things Roger and Lynda had paid for during Brenda’s pregnancy. She found one for the repair of a broken back car window. Danielle’s story, in at least that respect, had been accurate.
Danielle was facing her latest set of criminal charges when the moment came for her to testify. Her lawyer worried prosecutors might withdraw a plea deal they had presented to her if she testified on Cruz’s behalf. She did anyway.
Of course, the person who could best testify to Brenda’s drinking was Carolyn, her friend from 1998. O’Shea saw Carolyn’s name in Brenda’s arrest records, got her current whereabouts and met with her in a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. Carolyn had left Fort Lauderdale after being locked up in 1998, and had not set foot in Broward County in the quarter-century since. She’d been sober for more than two decades. She agreed to tell her story in court.
When she took the stand in fall 2022, she broke down almost immediately. A box of tissues was given to her. She told the jury some basic biographical information: She had children, grandchildren and even a great-grandchild. She was asked where she worked, and she said she had a job at a Dairy Queen. When asked if she did volunteer work, she said she did at an organization called Healing Hands, where she served as a mentor to women who were victims of domestic violence, struggling with homelessness, battling addiction or all the above.
“And why do you do that?” one of Cruz’s lawyers asked.
“Because a long time ago, somebody did that for me,” she answered.
Carolyn detailed the drinking and drugging with Brenda in 1998.
“I'm just grateful to be alive because of the kind of life we lived back then,” Carolyn testified. “I shouldn't even be here talking to you people.”
On the stand, Carolyn wept again, and before leaving spoke directly to Cruz, a boy she had never met, guilty of a crime she couldn’t fathom.
“Nikolas, I’m sorry,” she said, “but that’s how it was.”
Ken Jones was a young pediatrician when, one day in 1973, he was helping examine eight children at King County Hospital in Seattle, Washington. Jones had become interested in studying birth defects, and he was there that day along with his mentor, David W. Smith, a professor at the University of Washington. The children had some similar physical features — smooth upper lips, eyes set oddly — as well as deficits in intelligence and memory. Doctors at the hospital wondered if there was something that united them, and had recently discovered they’d all been born to women who were chronic alcoholics.
What happened in that Seattle hospital room, for Jones and Smith, was in many ways the birth of the formal study of the effects of alcohol on fetuses during pregnancy.
Early in pregnancies, the unborn child lacks a liver capable of processing alcohol; the placenta, for its part, offers no filtration to limit the flow of alcohol to the fetus, either. As a result, the blood alcohol levels of the growing baby can match exactly the levels of the pregnant woman, whether she’d merely had a glass of wine or gone on a gin bender for a week. In utero, alcohol is a teratogen, capable of causing brain damage, birth defects and even death.
Jones and his colleagues, in an effort that would span a half-century, began to identify and catalog the possibly shared consequences of such repeated exposure to alcohol: small or damaged brains; low IQs; problems with memory and language; shortcomings with what is called executive functioning, qualities such as emotional control and organized thinking.
Over the decades, the research would become inarguable. The American Academy of Pediatrics would issue warnings about drinking during pregnancy, and the College of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Washington, D.C., also joined in raising alarm. Eventually, the Office of the Surgeon General added its voice.
Amid the growing consensus, there would be wrinkles in the understanding of the phenomenon. Not every child whose mother drank during pregnancy would wind up significantly impaired, or even harmed at all. Yet in some cases, any amount of alcohol could do lasting damage. When exactly the drinking occurred during pregnancy could affect outcomes, too. Drinking early in a pregnancy, such as in the six weeks before a woman might even know she was carrying a child, could be particularly harmful.
As the research matured, the recognition of how children exposed to alcohol before birth could be affected broadened. The damage — fetal brain cell death — was found to be irreversible. Women who abused alcohol during pregnancy could also eat poorly, suffer from extreme stress and fail to get prenatal care — all things that could exacerbate the harm caused by alcohol. The resulting children, particularly if undiagnosed, could struggle with educational, social and behavioral issues: anxiety, impulsivity, an inability to empathize, explosive and aggressive outbursts, difficulty following rules or taking responsibility, vulnerability to peer pressure, problems connecting cause and effect, and inability to recognize the consequences of their actions.
Studies began to show that such affected, untreated children wound up overrepresented in foster care, mental health facilities and the criminal legal system. As many as 60% of such children dropped out of school, one study concluded. A Canadian report showed that from 30% to more than 50% of those locked up in the country’s prisons had been exposed to alcohol in utero. Research in the U.S. has found that children harmed by fetal alcohol exposure, and untreated, had their first involvement with the law, on average, at age 12.
The range of diagnoses for those harmed by alcohol exposure in utero is today grouped under an umbrella category — fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) — and one of those disorders is formally listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The cognitive and behavioral impairments resulting from prenatal alcohol exposure are recognized by the National Academy of Medicine, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the International Classification of Diseases.
Michael Dorris’ 1989 book “The Broken Cord” brought considerable notoriety to the effects of fetal alcohol exposure, and today FASD United is a national organization devoted to supporting families working to care for those with one of the disorders. In 2012, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution calling on lawyers, prosecutors and judges to better understand the role FASD plays in the lives of so many caught up in the criminal legal system.
Yet to this day, the public’s full appreciation of the consequences of drinking during pregnancy remains sketchy, Jones said, and the challenge in diagnosing and treating the disorders is considerable. One in seven women is believed to drink at least some alcohol during pregnancy. Mothers who do can be reluctant to admit it to doctors and other professionals who might help. “Stigma is a horrible problem,” Jones said. Children with FASD can also be misdiagnosed as autistic, and those who struggle in school are often erroneously regarded as merely lazy or willfully defiant.
Early diagnosis and appropriate interventions, then, are vital, Jones said. Children with FASD, he said, “need an outside brain,” people in their daily lives who can help them learn to process, adapt, cope and succeed. There are too few such people to meet the need, Jones said.
Cruz would benefit from none of it — not an early diagnosis, not tailored intervention, no “outside brain” able to steer and coach him through life.
Lynda had not wanted to adopt a disabled child, and O’Shea and the defense team found she resisted repeated encouragement — from her son’s counselors, teachers and neighbors — to have him evaluated for the impact of the drug or alcohol abuse of his birth mother. Despite knowing exactly the kind of life Brenda had lived during her pregnancy, Lynda was more comfortable accepting the idea her son might be autistic.
Over the years, Cruz would never be diagnosed with a fetal alcohol disorder. Not when, as a young schoolboy, he opted to spend his time in class inside a large cardboard box, so acute was his social anxiety. Not when he became obsessed with violent video games and rampaged through the house when he lost at them. Not when the police were repeatedly called to the Cruz home because he’d killed a neighbor’s chickens or assaulted his own mother. And not when he began to collect high-powered guns, talking to them and sleeping with them at night.
“Guns became his identity, at least as much as he could come up with one,” said O’Shea.
Only when he’d killed 17 people at a high school he never should have attended would Cruz be seen by experts in FASD. Two such experts, including Jones, tested and evaluated Cruz, drawing on school and medical records dating back to his birth. Upon being delivered, it turned out, Cruz had to be resuscitated. As early as age 3, he was found to have “overall impairment in adaptive functioning abilities.” A psychological exam done when he was 5 years old showed problems with memory, language, reasoning and impulsivity.
Tests done at the request of the defense team showed Cruz had an IQ of 83, below average even for FASD children. He had deficits in nine of 11 domains of the brain, including suggestibility and executive functioning. The diagnosis, according to Jones, was definitive: alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder. In fact, Jones said, in reviewing the birth records and the accounts of Brenda, Carolyn and Danielle, he’d never seen such a convincingly documented case of an expectant mother’s drinking.
To prepare to testify in the Parkland case, Jones went and saw Cruz in person.
“Just a devastated, destroyed human being,” Jones said in an interview. “So many things going against him throughout his whole life — all of them related to alcohol.”
Jones testified at length at the trial. He said he’d spent hundreds of hours researching Cruz’s life and limitations. He charged no fee.
The defense felt his testimony went so well that they opted to cut short their list of witnesses and rest their case for mercy.
Joel Maney said Cruz was still in shock when he first met him inside the Broward County jail. The night before, Cruz had submitted to hours of interrogation after being captured by the authorities. He’d barely been able to speak at the start of the interrogation, but he was coherent and did not dispute the chilling facts of what he had done.
“Certain things are going to be hard to explain,” the detective conducting the interview told Cruz, “but you are the only one who can explain.”
He couldn’t, really. Cruz spoke of hearing voices in his head, of a lost girlfriend, of being embarrassed about having been suspended from the Parkland high school for fighting. He said he’d previously considered shooting people at a public park, and described trying to kill himself in recent weeks by overdosing on ibuprofen. When asked why he wanted to end his life, he answered, “Loneliness.”
Cruz said he’d bought guns over the years because they looked cool and made him feel safe. He asked the detective if he could be seen by a doctor. The detective said Cruz had already been medically cleared to be interrogated. No doctor would be coming.
“What the fuck is wrong with me?” Cruz asked out loud once the detective left.
Cruz was on his own to face 17 counts of premeditated murder.
Maney, the 66-year-old ex-cop, along with other members of the defense team, was startled when initially encountering Cruz. He was short, frail, withdrawn.
“My first thought was just like, ‘That’s not him. That can’t be right,’” Casey Secor remembers saying to himself when seeing Cruz for the first time. “Somebody that tiny can't have done something this big.”
Cruz’s end of a conversation, the team would discover, was a hit-and-miss exercise in saying what he thought others wanted to hear. He rarely guessed right.
“Like talking to an empty box,” said O’Shea.
The work of the defense team was an all-consuming effort that took place over four years. With weekly progress meetings and the use of a war room as the trial neared, the work was divided up. O’Shea handled much of the research into Cruz’s life. Secor was a specialist in jury selection, and had developed a command of fetal alcohol disorders.
Maney did a mix of things — reading a dozen or so books on the psychology of school shooters, serving subpoenas on school officials still reeling from the events of 2018, hand-holding witnesses who eventually made it to court, grabbing them coffee or ushering them outside through side doors.
Most significantly — and most difficult — he would serve as a companion to Cruz. In scores of visits, and over hundreds of hours both emotional and utterly vacuous, he talked and listened, and wrestled with his own fury and desolation.
On that first day at the Broward County jail and every day after, Maney said it was impossible not to be overwhelmed by the brutality and scope of what Cruz had wrought. Maney had raised his own children in Broward County. He’d served alongside some of the officers who responded to the school on Valentine’s Day 2018. It was hard for Maney, who in his career had trained police forces from Bogota to Tokyo, not to feel vengeful when he met Cruz in the jail. Alone with a mass murderer, he entertained thoughts of killing him inside the jail and being done with it.
Yet for Maney, no line in the sand would free him of his obligation, no body count too high. And so in the jail that day six years ago, Maney promised Cruz he would not be alone. The jury would wrestle with the question of mercy; for now, Maney would offer him human decency. Cruz was neither unworthy nor unreachable.
“I can get to this kid,” Maney said.
Maney would read to Cruz, children’s books about wolves or articles from National Geographic. Cruz confessed for the first time that he’d been sexually abused repeatedly by a neighbor’s son, something O’Shea later heard from some of Lynda’s friends, although the alleged abuser was never investigated or charged. Maney would screen Cruz’s prison mail, a mix of earnest outreach and disturbing pleas for romance.
In all those encounters, Maney would never forgive Cruz; what he’d done was beyond even understanding. But there was a history inside the “empty box” of Cruz, a life not only shaped by damage done before his birth, but that of a boy in search of everyday desires — to be accepted, to be seen as confident and attractive and tough, to amount to more than an accumulation of problems and disappointments.
Maney had been a troubled boy himself, one for whom a life in prison had been predicted. He grew up in Rockford, Illinois, the son of a single, hard-drinking, often mean and neglectful mother, now long dead.
Turns out, one of his mother’s drinking partners was a local patrol sergeant with the Rockford police. Maney loved how well the cop was put together — dressed impeccably, shoes shined, splashed with aftershave.
“He smelled perfect,” Maney said.
He would have wanted him for a father. The cop’s presence in his life made Maney think about becoming an officer. It was not a direct route.
Maney was drinking by the time he was 13, lost a friend to a drunk driving accident at 16, and left high school without graduating, his principal’s last words ringing in his ears: “You are headed to state prison.”
Maney left school, but got his GED. He took a job as a part-time, small-town cop in Illinois, impressed his bosses, and soon set off for Florida. He outperformed hundreds on the test for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, and enjoyed a career of 35 years in virtually every unit available in the agency — major crimes, undercover, crimes against children, vice, drug trafficking, joint task forces with the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.
When he retired, Maney signed on to work with the public defender’s office. He respected the role of defense lawyers. He was given the title of fact investigator and assigned to the most violent felony cases.
Maney said he was tough on Cruz. There would be no self-pity. As a kid, Cruz had used racial slurs, and was taken with Nazi ideology. If Cruz was going to talk about himself, Maney would tolerate no bullshit. Cruz eventually came to call Maney “Papa Joel,” and Maney told Cruz that, perhaps in another life, he might have mentored Cruz and they could have been fishing buddies.
For Cruz, of course, there was no other life, just the strange and catastrophic one that had ended along with the 17 lives he took one afternoon in Parkland.
Lynda lived in something of a fantasy world with her adopted children, and her capacity for denial of reality hindered her ability to get them the specialized treatment they needed. For years, she presented herself to the world as the biological mother of Nikolas and his brother Zachary, their status as adopted children a source of embarrassment to her. She even kept Zachary’s kinky hair short to hide the fact that his birth father was Black.
Zachary, for his part, was beset by his own behavioral issues, despite being spared the impact of Brenda’s alcoholism. He and Nikolas would fight often, and violently, with Zachary usually prevailing. When Zachary was granted a visit with Nikolas while he was in police custody after the shooting, he apologized for how he’d treated his brother.
“I know you thought I hated you,” he told his brother in the recorded encounter. “I acted that way because I didn't want to seem weak.”
Roger had been a success in the advertising business, and the home he bought in Parkland was handsome and spacious. He and Lynda provided for the boys, often lavishly so. But Roger had dropped dead of a heart attack in front of Cruz when the boy was just six years old. With Roger’s death, Lynda was on her own to manage the family’s finances. Roger had cashed in the life insurance policies he’d held; there would be no payout. Further, his advertising work had been secretly in decline for years.
Lynda, the defense team found out, felt betrayed, and in short order, overwhelmed. She was not without money, but became fearful of not having enough. She did everything for Nikolas, her oldest and most troubled boy, but his needs and challenges — at school, with friends, in his volatile and often violent relationship with Zachary — were beyond her abilities. O’Shea said it became clear Lynda had “buyer’s remorse” with her two adopted boys.
“Lynda wanted so badly to have a normal kid,” O’Shea said.
And so she would choose denial and acquiescence.
When others tried to make sure Cruz did not join the Parkland school’s Junior ROTC program, Lynda persisted, and Cruz would even be allowed onto the program’s marksmanship team. It’s where he learned to shoot a gun. When the cops came to the house after yet another explosive episode with her son — a psychologist who would visit the home described it as “a war zone” — Lynda would decline to have him arrested.
And, critically, in 2017, when officials at Stoneman Douglas wanted Cruz sent back to Cross Creek, the specialized school where he’d had some success, Lynda fought the idea. Frustrated, school officials told her if Cruz were to stay, he would be stripped of the support services the school had been providing. They had tried their best, they told her; they wanted him somewhere else. Lynda insisted on Cruz remaining at the school, and in short order, his behavior in school went further off the rails.
Marked by cuts from self-harm, Cruz told a school peer counselor he’d been drinking gasoline. He had a swastika on his backpack. Some school personnel pleaded with the school security officer to have Cruz committed to a psychiatric facility, but he refused to act. Ultimately, Cruz was forced to withdraw from Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Weeks later, he bought his first gun.
A Florida public safety commission would criticize much of the school and police response to the threat Cruz posed as a student and his eventual assault in Parkland. The school’s security chief was criminally charged for his failure to respond quickly and decisively on the day of the shooting, although he was ultimately acquitted at trial. Broward County Sheriff’s officers waited too long, too. Maney is unforgiving of those officers, many of whom he’d once called colleagues. “Cowards,” he called them.
The officers who responded to the Cruz household over the years were hardly better, Maney said. There was a series of calls for help of one kind or another involving Cruz — Lynda reporting he’d assaulted her with a hose from the vacuum cleaner; times he would run off and go missing; a neighbor reporting Cruz had shot their chickens; a woman reporting his online postings of guns and his threat to do a school shooting.
Maney maintains all those calls represented chances to have Cruz involuntarily committed for an evaluation. Since 1972, Florida has authorized law enforcement and certain medical professionals to send a person at risk of harming themselves or others to a hospital or other facility, and be held for 72 hours pending a formal assessment. In his work as a cop, Maney had done such a thing to several troubled people he’d encountered.
Given all that had been reported about Cruz — mental health struggles, his acts of self-harm, his access to guns — Maney said it would not have been hard to get him detained and evaluated, maybe have his guns taken away.
Then, just three months before the shooting in Parkland, Lynda was gone as well. She’d come down with pneumonia, stopped eating and resisted treatment. Those close to her felt she had chosen to die, betrayed by her late husband’s mismanagement of finances and overwhelmed by her children. Cruz and his brother told the defense team that no member of Roger’s or Lynda’s families, including a godparent to Cruz, contacted them after they’d lost both their parents, ignoring their pleas for help or acknowledgement.
Weeks before the shooting, Cruz had called 911 himself. Lynda had sold the big house in Parkland and moved the boys into a townhouse. With her death, Cruz had gone to live with former neighbors, bringing the numerous guns he now owned with him. In the 911 call, Cruz said he’d been assaulted by one of the neighbor’s sons, a boy he’d later say had repeatedly sexually assaulted him in childhood. He called from a playground nearby. He was hurt and alone, he told the dispatcher.
“The thing is, I lost my mother a couple days ago, so, like, I’m dealing with a bunch of things right now,” he said in the call. Officers responded, but Cruz was simply sent to another neighborhood home that would take him in.
In his months of effort, Maney helped during jury selection — noticing a tattoo behind the ear of one prospective juror declaring that she believed in second chances; he wanted her seated. And he provided a bracing bit of an old cop’s candor when the team had far-reaching conversations about why Cruz had done what he’d done. “Because he fucking wanted to, and he fucking could,” Maney said bluntly.
Maney’s many dealings with Cruz produced a range of reactions and insights. Maney said he came to believe Cruz had loved his adoptive parents. He allowed Cruz to correspond in letters and emails with a young woman whom he believed wanted to befriend him, and saw how much it meant for Cruz to feel wanted. The woman turned out not to be real, but part of a catfishing prank. And, often and at length, Cruz talked with Maney about his guns. Cruz had researched them online. He’d posted photographs of himself with them. He’d spent hours racking and reracking them when at home.
“He loved guns. He loved the sound of them. He loved the feel of them, the power of them,” Maney said. With his guns, Maney said, the world that had been beyond his ability to navigate “was in control.”
Cruz had told investigators he had tried to shoot himself at the end of his murderous attack, but the gun jammed. Maney never believed it, and in the Broward County jail one day, he confronted him.
“I said, ‘Why didn't you fucking kill yourself? Didn't you plan on killing yourself like every other fucking school shooter?’ That's how I would talk to him. ‘Why the fuck are you sitting in front of me? Why didn't you fucking put a bullet in your fucking head after you killed all those kids?’
“He hit me with the truth,” Maney said. “Joel, you know I'm a pussy,” Cruz told Maney.
Maney has struggled since the trial ended. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is on his regular bike route, and he stops every day to pay his respects. The case, he said, made him a maniac in front of his family, and drove him to self-medicate with alcohol meant to dull his suffocating combination of rage and sorrow.
“I want to make Nikolas Cruz a page in my history book and move on,” he said. “It’ll be hard.”
Shortly after 2 p.m., on Feb. 14, 2018, Alex Schachter, 14, was at his desk at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. That morning, his father Max had wished him a good day at school, and now, at work on an English paper, he was just minutes away from dismissal.
Alex had lost his mother when he was 4 years old, but Max Schachter and his two boys — Ryan was Alex’s older brother — had moved to Parkland to build a new life in a safe neighborhood with some of Florida’s best schools. Schachter had found love again, and with his partner’s two girls from an earlier marriage, there were four kids in the blended family.
Alex adored his older brother, and enjoyed his two newly acquired sisters, allowing them to comb his hair while he played video games at home. He was a pretty sharp basketball player and an accomplished trombonist, playing in the school’s marching band. His favorite song was one he must have picked up on from his dad: an oldie by the band Chicago, “25 or 6 to 4.”
Cruz shot Alex through the window in the classroom door, severing his spinal cord and killing him as he stood up in response to the gunfire.
Schachter, along with the parents of others killed that day, wanted Cruz executed. They worked with prosecutors to see that it happened, and gave victim impact statements in court. They were heartbreaking. Corey Hixon, the disabled son of the school’s beloved wrestling coach, Christopher Hixon, managed to get one sentence out — “I miss him” — before hugging his mother, who sat with him at the witness stand. One father, during his tribute to his daughter, suddenly realized he was wearing the suit he’d worn during his last school dance with her.
When Cruz was ultimately spared, Schachter and other family members spoke again at the formal sentencing hearing.
They would not address Cruz by name; some called him an animal and a monster. They made it clear they’d be pleased if he was raped or beaten or killed behind bars. When Schachter spoke, he noted that it was his birthday.
“I want you to know,” he said to Cruz, “that every November 1, I will be celebrating my birthday while you are in prison, and every November 1, I will be blowing out my birthday candles, and you know what my wish will be? That you suffer a painful, painful, violent death.”
Austin Sarat, a professor at Amherst College who has studied the death penalty in America for decades, said the need for vengeance is a natural human reaction for those who, say, have seen their child killed at school.
“Vengeance is an effort to reorder the world after incomprehensible loss,” Sarat said. “My child was killed; the killer should die. It makes sense and feels just.”
For the Parkland families, their fury extended beyond Cruz to his defense team. Their efforts to humanize Cruz struck some family members as obscene. That the lawyers might, in the course of a day, place a hand on their client’s shoulder was even worse. The defense’s objections to the judge’s rulings or other contentious developments in the trial were worthy of sanctions. An embarrassing moment before the trial began, when one of the lawyers was seen laughing with Cruz and giving the middle finger to a member of the defense team who was monitoring the Court TV cameras, was contemptible. The lead defense lawyer’s decision to wear a white outfit for her closing argument, a color associated with innocence or purity, was an intentional insult, one mother alleged.
One after another, the parents berated the defense team. Victim statements at sentencing hearings are supposed to be directed only at the judge. But the judge, over objections that what was taking place was dangerous in an atmosphere of public anger at the verdict, allowed the insults to flow.
“You have no conscience,” Schachter said to the defense members. “You make me sick.”
“It is not anger or revenge that put me in this position,” Patricia Padauy-Oliver said after rising to speak. Her 17-year-old son, Joaquin Oliver, had been killed not long after he’d become a naturalized U.S. citizen. “I want you to listen very well. I am far beyond those feelings. I have emptiness. I have sadness, and I have grief. I am broken. I am broken. I am broken. I am broken. I am broken. And I am broken.”
She said she would not feel bad for the defense members in “their sleepless nights where you will hear your heart pounding” in worry about what they had done or of what might become of them.
“Karma,” she warned, “will eventually catch up to you all.”
Both the families of the slain in Parkland, and many of the students who survived, became articulate and committed advocates for gun control and safer schools. Some parents created their own foundations to seek such ends. At least two parents wrote books. Sophisticated, accomplished and devoted, many of the parents and siblings wanted Cruz to pay with his life.
Casey Secor has long believed that prosecutors too often don’t fully level with victim families in death penalty cases: about how long the appeals process will be if a jury decides in favor of execution; that when the executions happen devastated families often don’t feel the satisfaction and relief they might have imagined; that victim families should dearly hope that the accused killer has the very best defense, for anything less will invite appeals alleging inadequate assistance of counsel.
Seeking death, Secor said, was typically a political decision by elected prosecutors concerned about seeming tough on crime.
Robert Schentrup was one family member who agreed with Secor. His sister Carmen was killed by Cruz. Carmen loved art and music, and played piano, violin and guitar while also singing in the church choir. She’d been accepted into the honors program at the University of Florida, and thought she might one day help cure ALS.
Carmen and Robert’s parents gave victim impact statements, but Robert opted to stay away from what he called a “shitshow” of a trial, a “circus” created by the state of Florida.
“We have politicians and those in power who use our stories to kind of politically grandstand and show off their own priorities,” Schentrup told me. “This trial, in my opinion, was not something about serving the families and our needs and our interests, but about serving those in Florida and what they wanted to happen.”
Schachter, of course, felt otherwise, and in his time at the lectern, he made a lengthy and passionate case against mercy for Cruz.
Cruz, he said, was not some impoverished and neglected child who fell through cracks in society’s safety net. He’d been seeing mental health professionals since he was 3, special educational plans were developed for him, and he spent at least some time in schools meant to deal with challenging children. Roger and Lynda Cruz, while they were alive, loved him and provided for him, often to excess.
Cruz did not have mental illness, Schachter asserted; he was not brain damaged. To say so was an insult to those really suffering. An expert witness called by the prosecution had alleged Cruz faked his mental disability when tested before the trial. The failed efforts of those who tried to help Cruz, Schachter argued, were not evidence of Cruz’s profound sickness, but rather that he was, in the end, evil.
“He is a sociopath that does not deserve to live among us,” Schachter argued, turning to Cruz.
The notion that life in prison was an adequate outcome was wrong.
“He gets to receive phone calls, boxes of fan mail. He gets to fall in love and get married. He gets a tablet to email and text people. How is that punishment?”
After the trial, Schachter, along with other family members, were permitted to go inside the school building where their children had died. Alex’s chair was covered in blood. So, too, was the English paper lying on the ground. Schachter was asked if he wanted to put on gloves to handle his son's things.
“No, I don't care,” he said. “It's my little boy's blood.”
Since his son’s death, Schachter has created an organization called Safe Schools for Alex, and he has worked to enact legislation in Florida and around the country to improve security policies at schools.
Recently, Schachter told me his opinion of Cruz’s defense team had not changed in the months since the verdict. The death penalty, he said, was supposed to be for the worst of the worst. How could anyone argue, he asked, that Cruz was not that?
“They should just fucking kill him,” Schachter said. “Why do you even need a defense? I mean, if you are a mass murderer, you do not deserve any legal defense.”
The gate to Andrew Pollack’s sweeping ranch in Oregon’s Rogue Valley swung open automatically. It was October 2021, a year before Nikolas Cruz’s trial would start. Casey Secor was there to meet the father of an 18-year-old girl Cruz shot more than half a dozen times as she tried to get into the safety of a classroom.
Once inside the gate, an imposing dog was in front of Secor and Joel Maney, who had helped arrange the visit. Then, Pollack, who’d run a successful scrap metal business in New York before moving to Florida, appeared, a pistol on his hip. He gave a command to the dog, and it instantly came to heel.
Pollack had written a scathing book about all the failings that he felt had led to his daughter’s death: “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students.” Cruz’s defense team had shared with Pollack some information about Cruz for his book, and he was grateful for it. He’d invited Secor and Maney to the ranch, but was unsure how it would go.
“Today’s my daughter’s 21st birthday,” he told the men.
Furious at himself for not having known, Secor said he hung his head and apologized.
“Let’s go for a ride,” Pollack said, climbing into a farm vehicle.
What followed, Secor said, were two days of conversations, explanations, respect, grace and even laughter.
“One of the most meaningful experiences of my legal career,” Secor said. “Greater than anything I could do in court.”
Secor, 45, spent parts of his childhood in the Northeast, and parts in the Deep South. His father was a lawyer, his grandfather, too. They’d each gone to Ivy League law schools, but it seemed to Secor they were unhappy in their work.
Secor surprised himself when he eventually went to law school. But attending Florida Coastal School of Law, a for-profit outfit routinely ranked near the very bottom of the country’s hundreds of law schools, was not his father’s idea of an accomplishment. He did not attend his son’s graduation.
Secor’s first exposure to death penalty work came as an intern in a public defender’s office in South Carolina. The accused had pleaded guilty and agreed to spend his life in prison. That struck Secor as accountability enough. He was shocked when the prosecutor pushed for execution.
“It was one of those moments when your whole sense that the world is a sophisticated, rational place just came crumbling down — the idea that this guy was being denied the opportunity to accept responsibility for what he did and go to prison for the rest of his life because a politician, a publicly elected politician, wanted to kill him,” Secor said. “It struck me as just profoundly wrong — profoundly wrong at best, and more like disgusting.”
Secor would go on to become a respected capital defense lawyer, and an expert in death penalty voir dire, the delicate identification and selection of jurors who, whatever their feelings about capital punishment, could be open to the idea that a defendant’s life story might be grounds for mercy.
Throughout his career, Secor has taken seriously the requirement that capital defense lawyers make an effort to speak with the victim families. A decision by the Army Court of Criminal Appeals had held that a failure to contact the widow in a death penalty case amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel. The American Bar Association has long had guidelines that spell out a capital case lawyer’s obligation to connect with those left behind by tragedy.
“Even if they tell me to go fuck myself, well, at least I know where I stand,” Secor said. “And I can say that I tried.”
The hope in any such interaction is that he can make his role clear, something he does not trust prosecutors to do for him.
“I view my role as not only an advocate for the defendant in the cases, but an advocate for the proper resolution of these cases,” he said.
In the Oregon sun, seated in Adirondack chairs with glorious views of the mountains in the distance, Pollack asked Secor directly: You actually feel sorry for these killers, for people like Cruz?
Secor speaks in long, thoughtful bursts of argument and modesty, as if he is forever making a closing argument. He said to Pollack:
“I don't feel sorry for them for what they've done, but I frequently end up feeling sorry for the lives that they lived. The sorrow that I feel for them is nothing compared to the sorrow that I feel for people like your child and people like you and all the friends and family members of all these people that Nik killed.”
Secor wasn’t sure he had gained Pollack’s openness or trust. He spoke again from the heart, with a brutal directness.
“I said, ‘If I had been in Parkland that day and I had a crystal ball and I knew it was going to happen, I’d have taken my Remington deer rifle to the roof of the 1200 Building, and when Nik stepped out of the Uber, I'd have blown his fucking brains out right there, and it wouldn't have bothered me at all.’”
Secor told Pollack his work was to limit people’s pain going forward.
Secor said something shifted in the moment, and would open the way for the next 36 meaningful hours together.
“There was just like a moment where he didn’t say anything, but he just sort of nodded. I think he was like, ‘All right, I got you. I understand.’”
Secor’s own best efforts to understand Cruz’s killing spree came down to this: a 19-year-old with brain damage, ostracized by peers for his behavior, his strangeness, his explosive anger, and threats to do harm — “a selfish piece of shit,” in Secor’s words — had been orphaned and left homeless with the death of his mother. Some young people like Cruz fight back, Secor said. Others can break.
“The only thing that he had left were his guns and his deep sadness and his label as a school shooter,” Secor said of Cruz. “And he lived out that identity in a way that many people feared, but never anticipated to be an actual possibility until February 14, 2018.”
Secor and Maney had dinner with Pollack’s family. They said a birthday prayer for Meadow. They talked about country music. Pollack told a story about a police dog specially trained to take on an active shooter even in a chaotic scene of screams and sirens. The trainers had named it Meadow.
Pollack had gone after a whole raft of school and law enforcement officials he blamed for his daughter’s death. Many had paid with their jobs or reputations, or both. In Pollack’s eyes, Cruz was a known threat that everyone avoided dealing with decisively because they were either too timid or politically correct or incompetent.
Pollack said the school’s policy of “restorative justice,” one that sought to resolve wrongdoing without involving law enforcement, was an example. He said students could commit all sorts of crimes at the school and not be properly disciplined.
“You could assault the teacher, you could rob an iPhone, you could sell weed, you could assault another student and never get arrested,” he said.
Pollack said Cruz was known to security and other officials at the school as the “crazy boy.” He was regularly frisked, so dangerous was he regarded. Pollack said that after Cruz was pushed out of Stoneman Douglas, he returned and was found trespassing at the school.
“Maybe if they would have arrested him, he might not have ever gone back to that school,” Pollack said.
He argued the school’s policies meant some students became adults feeling they could get away with anything. They’d effectively been taught that at school.
“So you actually set kids up for failure with these liberal policies,” he said.
What enraged Pollack further was that the officials never took responsibility for what he called their failures. That’s why he poured himself into efforts to get the officials punished.
In seeking accountability, Pollack said he attended every public hearing, every inquest, every release of the state commission that investigated the government’s role in the case.
“I went after everybody in that county, and I got everyone that I wanted that was responsible for my daughter getting murdered,” he said. “I found out they all failed. And if they would have accepted accountability, they probably would still have their jobs.”
The book his efforts produced, he said, amounted to a guide for parents interested in keeping their children safe.
But he wanted no part of Cruz’s trial.
“I didn't follow it. I didn't watch it on the news,” he said. “I didn't do interviews on it. There was nothing I could do to hold the killer accountable. That was out of my hands.”
He calculated that even if the death penalty was imposed, it would be ages before it might get done, if ever. Pollack declined to give a victim impact statement.
Cruz losing his liberty forever was enough.
“He's living a miserable hell,” he said. “Looking at walls for the rest of his life.”
Before Secor left the ranch, Pollack gave him what’s called a “challenge coin,” one created in his daughter’s name, a token of remembrance for someone sick, hurt or lost. Secor has had the coin with him every day since.
“You know, if my apartment caught on fire, probably the only two material things that I would care about would be my guitar and that coin,” he said.
Pollack, in a spring 2024 telephone interview, said he’s not really capable of joy in his altered life, and may never be. He’s not the same man he was before he lost his only daughter, he said. But he has two sons and a wife, and a ranch where he raises cattle and goats.
“I try my best,” he said of the life he’s been left to lead.
Pollack said he enjoyed his time with Secor and Maney. He said their defense of Cruz was not work he could ever do — attaching one’s devotion and talents to a crime so awful. That said, he respected their obligation.
“They did their job,” he said. “Somebody’s got to do it.”
He certainly bore the defense team no animus.
“All the parents hate them, they all hate them but me,” he said. “I think it probably gives them some comfort that I don't hate them, you know what I mean?”
Once inside the 1200 Building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the jurors who were weighing a sentence of life or death for Cruz were told not to speak, point or gesture. They were there only to observe where the 17 victims had died. The bailiffs offered covering for their shoes, concerned about the blood and glass.
The jurors during the trial had already been shown crime scene photographs and autopsy pictures, so they were able to connect what they saw in the hallways and classrooms to specific children and moments from the video they had watched of Cruz’s deliberate, determined stalking and shooting of students, many of whom were racing wildly for their lives.
There were Valentine’s Day flowers in some spots, a chess board with the pieces frozen in time. Some jurors stopped for a long, silent moment where Peter Wang, 15, was shot dead while trying to open a door to safety. Wang was a member of the school’s Junior ROTC program, and was posthumously admitted to West Point.
The jurors could also see a James Dean quotation still painted on a hallway wall: “Dream as if you will live forever. Live as if you will die today.”
The prosecution of Cruz had been led by Mike Satz, who had come out of retirement to spearhead the case for death. Satz had served 44 years as Broward County district attorney. In his opening statement to the jury, Satz noted Cruz’s internet writings and videos. “No mercy, no questions,” Cruz had written, “I am going to kill a ton of people and children.”
“It is said that what one writes and says is a window into their soul,” Satz said to the jury. The killings that happened in the 1200 Building, he added, “were relentlessly heinous, atrocious and cruel.”
Casey Secor had spent days in the 1200 Building preparing for trial. He had hoped to spare the jury a tour of the place. But he felt it a kind of sacred ground. Secor said he had worn jeans and cowboy boots the first day he visited the 1200 Building, but, struck by what he called the “solemnity” of the site, he chose to wear a suit every day afterward.
“It didn’t feel right to wear anything else,” he said.
The defense, it turned out, had waited to make its opening statement until the prosecution had completed its case. Had they done it at the start of the trial, they feared, jurors would not have remembered the details of Cruz’s troubled life after the avalanche of terrifying and crushing evidence.
One juror was struck by what she heard from school officials and doctors about missed opportunities to adequately diagnose and effectively treat Cruz.
“I felt the system failed,” the juror, Melody Vanoy, explained in a CNN interview shortly after the verdict. She said what treatment Cruz did receive was inconsistent and inadequate, from his birth until the day of the killings.
By the end of the trial, courtroom bailiffs were taking bets that Cruz would get life. But deliberations proved difficult and painful. Before the first day was over, a rough vote had been taken. There were six for death, four undecided and two for life. The next 24 hours turned tense.
“The energy was so heated, we wanted to get out of the room,” Vanoy said in one of her interviews after the verdict. She said she and others asked to clear the room, get away from each other and regather their commitment to following their oaths.
Desperate to persuade those holding out for life, one juror, Andrew Johnson, had Cruz’s rifle brought into the deliberations room. A bailiff later opened the door and turned over magazines of ammunition, invoking the pain of the victims’ families.
The campaign worked on one of the jurors, who appeared to suffer an anxiety attack before changing his vote from life to death. Three other jurors who had ultimately voted for life stood firm.
One juror afterward wrote to the judge to be on the record that she had not made up her mind prior to deliberations, as she’d been accused of by fellow jurors. Another juror wrote to the judge saying they’d been threatened, or felt that way. It was not disclosed which way that juror had voted. Johnson, the juror who had fought hard for death, told The New York Times he felt the deliberations were flawed from start to finish.
In an interview afterward, Vanoy took care to say she did not believe she and the others who had voted for life had let the families down. They had been instructed not to consider the victim impact statements in their deliberations. That was the law.
Johnson said he had a problem with another aspect of Florida law. That three jurors could trump the wishes of nine felt wrong. That a simple majority could not order death, he said, was a “huge flaw.”
In the courtroom that day, as the verdict for life was read out, the defense team was uncertain Cruz understood what had happened. He eventually managed to say, “Good,” and “Thank you.” He mostly wanted to know if people might still visit him in prison.
“Nik is just always trying to figure out what he’s supposed to say in any given situation,” Kate O’Shea said.
At the defense table, Secor opened his laptop and began to delete all the ugly case materials it held. There could be no appeal, and he no longer would have to sift through the files. The judge asked who might need a hug, and members of the victims’ families took her up on it.
Melisa McNeill, the team’s lead trial lawyer, and O’Shea found each other. They had worked the case for nearly five years.
“We did it,” they said to each other.
They then turned their faces to a courtroom wall and wept.
On April 20, 2023, less than six months after the verdict of life in prison for Cruz, Gov. Ron DeSantis held a news conference at the statehouse in Tallahassee. He was set to sign new legislation.
DeSantis had instantly and harshly criticized the jury verdict, and said he would have moved quickly to see Cruz executed had the verdict been death.
“This stings. It was not what we were hoping for,” DeSantis said after the verdict became public.
DeSantis, a Catholic, had previously shown little appetite for expediting executions. Indeed, critics on the right had pulled together what they said was evidence of his weakness on the question: He’d presided over just two executions, fewer than any first-term Florida governor in almost 50 years. Charlie Crist, the state’s former governor, had seen five people killed off death row; Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas and a national political rival to DeSantis, had ordered 55.
Now DeSantis was eager to make it easier for death sentences to be imposed.
With the stroke of his pen, DeSantis declared that Florida juries would no longer have to be unanimous to recommend execution. Prosecutors seeking death would only need to get eight of 12 jurors to vote that way. Florida thus became only the second state in the nation to require a less-than-unanimous jury verdict. Alabama, the other, demands that at least 10 of 12 jurors agree on death.
“I’m proud to sign legislation that will prevent families from having to endure what the Parkland families have,” DeSantis said.
A number of the Parkland families joined him for the announcement.
“This bill will bring full accountability to the perpetrators of wicked crimes and help victims receive justice,” said Tom and Gena Hoyer, the parents of Luke Hoyer, a 15-year-old freshman when he was killed.
In 2023 alone, Florida promptly carried out six executions of those already on death row.
Florida’s move to make it easier to see executions carried out runs counter to a sustained shift over the years in public opinion about capital punishment, both nationally and in the state. A Gallup poll in 2019 found that 60% of all Americans prefer a penalty of life imprisonment for murder, compared to just 36% who prefer a penalty of death, the first time in the history of Gallup polling on the question that a majority of Americans preferred life imprisonment. In Florida, a recent poll found that when people properly understood facts about capital punishment — that it is more expensive to seek death than to finance a murderer’s lifelong incarceration, for instance — support for execution fell to 29%.
The change in opinion across Florida, in part, was shaped by the fact that the state had seen more death row exonerations than any other in the country. That the innocent could be killed by the state was no theoretical abstraction.
The enactment of the 2023 legislation drew condemnation from the American Civil Liberties Union — “This is a dark day in Florida history,” the organization declared — and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The American Bar Association, in registering its alarm, declared that “empirical studies have revealed that, without a unanimity requirement for a recommendation of death, capital jurors do not devote the same energy or emotional commitment to the discussion among jurors on the ultimate sentencing decision, and pro-death jurors are able to overpower and ultimately silence undecided or minority viewpoint jurors.”
Rep. Berny Jacques, a former prosecutor who helped sponsor the legislation, said he had no concerns about the implications of the change, and had wanted to address the issue even before the Parkland verdict. He said the Florida Supreme Court that had ruled years earlier that unanimity was required to recommend death had done so in error. He said those facing the death penalty still had to be found guilty by a unanimous jury. The 8-4 requirement only dealt with the penalty phase of a prosecution.
“It's been part of human civilization as far as we can go,” Jacques said of the death penalty. “This is a proper function of the government to pursue. My moral foundations are rooted in my faith. I have no qualms morally, legally or constitutionally.”
Maria DeLiberato, the executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said the legislation resulted from a “perfect storm” of circumstances — the Parkland families advocating for it, and DeSantis, then about to run for president, seeing a chance to appear tough on crime. The bill faced almost no opposition, and many Democrats joined in supporting it.
DeSantis’ office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Casey Secor is confident the legislation won’t stand. In 2020, the Supreme Court held that any felony conviction required a unanimous jury vote, ending the practice of partial jury verdicts in Louisiana and Oregon. If unanimity was required to convict, Secor said, it surely will be required to impose death. A conviction, after all, can be reversed; an execution can’t.
For now, for the Cruz defense team, the change in the law amounts to the cruelest of ironies. They had each begun their work on the Parkland case asking themselves whether they were capable of mercy for Cruz, and whether they could ask 12 Florida citizens to extend such mercy to someone who had killed more people than anyone had stood trial for in America.
By their lights, they had done hard and principled work, and had their client’s life spared, only to see that successful effort used to make it far more likely that death sentences would be imposed. It is certainly lost on none of them that, under Florida’s new law, their client would have been sentenced to be executed. Their longshot bid for mercy would have failed.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Crist’s party affiliation; he became a Democrat after he left the governor’s office.
