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Ivy Schamis was never expecting to get closure from the trial of the gunman who killed 17 of her students and colleagues at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. “But,” she says, “it’s sort of a finality.”
Schamis had been teaching a class on the Holocaust at the high school on Feb. 14, 2018, when gunshots rang out in her classroom and killed two of her students, Helena Ramsay and Nicholas Dworet, both 17. Over the last three months, she watched the death-penalty trial of the gunman every day, searching for answers about why the gunman visited such horror on her community.
“What happened in this person’s life?” she told TIME before the jury reached a verdict. “What drives someone to just go and slaughter innocent, amazing people?”
On Thursday, the 12-person jury failed to unanimously agree on the death penalty for Nikolas Cruz, 24. The verdict, rendered after one day of deliberation, means that Cruz will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Cruz pleaded guilty last year to 17 counts of first-degree murder for the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
The decision follows a nearly three-month-long trial during which prosecutors highlighted devastating details of the shooting and the gunman’s “unspeakable, horrific brutality,” while defense attorneys focused on his mental health issues and his mother’s abuse of drugs and alcohol during pregnancy.
Jurors failed to unanimously agree that the aggravating factors in the case, including Cruz’s pre-planning of the shooting, outweighed these mitigating factors.
The trial was the first of its kind for a mass shooter in the U.S., and marked the deadliest mass shooting to go before a jury. Of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, eight of the gunmen—including those at…
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Source : time
