FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Nikolas Cruz pleaded guilty Wednesday to murdering 17 people during a shooting at his former high school in Parkland, Fla., leaving a jury to decide whether he will be executed for one of the nation's deadliest school shootings.
Relatives of the victims, sitting in the courtroom or watching the hearing via Zoom, broke down in tears and held hands across families as Cruz entered his pleas and later apologized for his crimes.
"These are capital felonies, and they're punishable one of two ways, either life in prison or the death penalty," Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer said. "Do you understand that you are facing a minimum, best-case scenario of life in prison?"
"Yes, ma'am," Cruz responded.
Before accepting the plea, Scherer emphasized that Cruz's decision would be irreversible, even if he ended up on death row. "You will not be able to change your mind," she told him.
The judge then read the 34 charges and asked how he wished to plead. "Guilty," Cruz said after each.
"Today we saw a cold and calculating killer confess to the murder of my daughter Gina and 16 other innocent victims at their school," said Tony Montalto. "His guilty pleas are the first step in the judicial process but there is no change for my family. Our bright, beautiful, and beloved daughter Gina is gone while her killer still enjoys the blessing of life in prison."
Montalto's daughter was 14 and sitting outside her classroom when Cruz shot her at close range numerous times.
Given the case's notoriety, Scherer plans to screen thousands of prospective jurors. Jury selection is scheduled to begin Jan. 4.
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Cruz entered his pleas after answering a long list of questions from Scherer aimed at confirming his mental competency. He was charged with 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted first-degree murder for those wounded in the Feb. 14, 2018, attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, located just outside Fort Lauderdale.
As several parents shook their heads, Cruz apologized, saying, "I'm very sorry for what I did. ... I can't live with myself sometimes." He also added that he wished it was up to the survivors to determine whether he lived or died.
Parents said Cruz's statement seemed self-serving and aimed at eliciting unearned sympathy. Gena Hoyer, whose 15-year-old son Luke died in the shooting, saw it as part of a defense strategy "to keep a violent, evil person off death row."
She said her son was "a sweet young man who had a life ahead of him and the person you saw in there today chose to take his life. He does not deserve life in prison."
Watching the hearing was painful, said Lori Alhadeff, whose daughter Alyssa Alhadeff, a 14-year-old freshman at Douglas, was killed in the attack.
Alhadeff said it was difficult to hear the attacker speak and to listen to prosecutors recounting what happened.
"It was really challenging and traumatic," said Alhadeff, who became a school safety proponent and was elected to the Broward School Board after the shooting. "But I know it's necessary in this process, for us to ultimately get to the penalty phase."
Anthony Borges, a former Stoneman Douglas student who was shot five times, told reporters after the hearing that he accepted Cruz's apology, but noted that it was not up to him to decide Cruz's fate.
"He made a decision to shoot the school," Borges said. "I am not God to make the decision to kill him or not. That's not my decision. My decision is to be a better person and to change the world for every kid. I don't want this to happen to anybody again. It hurts. It hurts. It really hurts. So, I am just going to keep going. That's it."
Cruz's attorneys announced his intention to plead guilty during a hearing last week.
After the pleas Wednesday, former Broward State Attorney Mike Satz recounted the details of the murders. Cruz killed 14 students and three staff members on Valentine's Day 2018 during a seven-minute attack through a three-story building at Stoneman Douglas, investigators said. They said he shot victims in the hallways and in classrooms with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, sometimes returning to the wounded to kill them with additional shots. Cruz had been expelled from Stoneman Douglas a year earlier after a history of threatening, frightening, unusual and sometimes violent behavior that dated back to preschool.
After Satz finished, the judge had to compose herself for several seconds before she began speaking again, her voice breaking.
The shootings caused some Stoneman Douglas students to launch the March for Our Lives movement, which pushes for stronger gun restrictions nationally.
A day before Cruz's plea, the families of those whom Cruz killed and dozens whom he injured or traumatized reached a $25 million settlement with the school district, according to a lawyer representing some of the families.
Attorney David Brill said the largest chunk of the settlement with Broward County Public Schools would be split among the families of the 14 students and three faculty members killed. The agreement settles 52 of the 53 negligence lawsuits filed against the school district over the shooting. The settlement includes 16 of the 17 people injured in the attack and 19 suffering from PTSD or other conditions years later.
Since days after the shooting, Cruz's attorneys had offered to have him plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, saying that would spare the community the emotional turmoil of reliving the attack at trial. But Satz rejected the offer, saying Cruz deserved a death sentence, and appointed himself lead prosecutor. Satz, 79, stepped down as state attorney in January after 44 years, but remains Cruz's chief prosecutor.
His successor, Harold Pryor, is opposed to the death penalty but has said he will follow the law. Like Satz, he never accepted the defense offer -- as an elected official, that would have been difficult, even in Broward County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 2 to 1.
By having Cruz plead guilty, his attorneys will be able to argue during the penalty hearing that he took responsibility for his actions.
As at any trial, prosecutors will present evidence of the shooting, including security video that purportedly shows many of the killings. They will also be allowed to show evidence that Cruz had long planned the attack and made threats through cellphone videos. There will be testimony from students and teachers who were in the building, including some who were wounded.
Prosecutors will also present testimony from the victims' parents and spouses to demonstrate the toll the deaths have had on families and the community.
The defense will then present mitigating evidence that will likely include testimony about Cruz's life, including his long history of mental and emotional instability, his father's death when he was 5 and his mother's death four months before the shootings, when he was 19.
To impose a death sentence, all 12 jurors must agree. If they do, Scherer will make the final decision.
Information for this article was contributed by Terry Spencer of The Associated Press; and by Derek Hawkins, Mark Berman and Timothy Bella of The Washington Post.
