Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz as a toddler was intellectually and bodily behind different kids, which brought on him to isolate himself and hit and chew to get what he needed, a daycare administrator and former neighbor testified Tuesday at his penalty trial for mass homicide.
Cruz’s attorneys started the second day of their protection by constructing on testimony that his beginning mom’s cocaine and alcohol abuse throughout being pregnant left him severely mind broken, placing him on a highway that led to him murdering 14 college students and three employees members at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018.
They are attempting to influence his jury to condemn him to life with out parole as a substitute of loss of life. Cruz, 23, pleaded responsible in October to the murders and the trial is barely to find out his sentence.
Anne Fischer, who ran the daycare heart Cruz attended from about age 1, stated he didn’t progress as quick as different kids and was smaller. She stated whereas the opposite toddlers might ask for his or her water cups and use a spoon, Cruz couldn’t. She stated he would fall down when he tried to run and his head and ears appeared disproportional to his physique.
“He isolated himself a lot. He would sit in the corner and observe,” Fischer stated.
He pushed different youngsters as a result of he “didn’t know how to express himself,” she stated. “If someone else had a toy that Nikolas wanted, he would just go up and grab the toy and hit the child’s hand to get the toy or the object. If a teacher was trying to work with him to get him to use his spoon or not his hand, he would hit the teacher’s hand away.”
She stated Lynda Cruz, his adoptive mom, was loving towards Nikolas and tried to do the perfect she might, however was slow to confess he had issues.
She stated that because the taking pictures, she generally feels a bit responsible, questioning if there was one thing she might have completed “so he could be a better person.”
Patricia Devaney-Westerlind, who lived throughout the road from Lynda and Roger Cruz, stated Lynda Cruz saved the household’s 4,500-square-foot dwelling immaculate and that she was nurturing to Nikolas and his youthful half-brother Zachary, whom the household additionally adopted.
“He was a cute little baby,” she stated of Nikolas. “She would go and get him all these sailor outfits. She was just the happiest I ever saw her.”
But she noticed lots of the identical points that Fischer did — that aside from her daughter, who was about eight months youthful than him, Nikolas Cruz couldn’t relate to different kids.
“I didn’t see anything that different until about maybe 18 months old. He’s very, very hyper. Very,” she stated. “Always running around. He wasn’t talking, so if he wanted a toy, he would go after someone.”
Devaney-Westerlind stated when the youngsters of the neighborhood would collect at her dwelling, Cruz would keep by himself and conceal behind the blinds.
“You’d see all the kids playing on the floor with different toys and he’d be somewhere else,” she stated.
She stated Cruz was a mattress and pants wetter till he was 6 or 7, which brought on different kids to select on him.
“He would get upset and he would start breaking their toys,” she stated. “He would be very upset, he would clench his fists. He’d be very angry. It would go on for a while. He wouldn’t get over it.”
The protection is making an attempt to beat the prosecution’s case, which featured surveillance video of Cruz mowing down college students and employees as he stalked a three-story constructing for seven-minutes, photographs of the aftermath and a jury go to to the constructing.
For Cruz to obtain a loss of life sentence, the jury have to be unanimous. If one juror votes for all times, that will probably be his sentence.