Nikolas Cruz receives Life Imprisonment, Florida Jury Spares Parkland Shooter of Death Sentence

A verdict in the trial over the deadliest high school shooting in our nation’s history. Parkland School shooter Nikolas Cruz is expected now to spend the rest of his life in prison without parole.

The jury did find in this case there were aggravating factors that could warrant the death sentence but in the end, they did not outweigh they said the mitigating circumstances established by the defense in the case.

Judge Elizabeth Scherer read through the verdicts today of all 17 First Degree Murder counts before that packed courtroom in it. Family members of victims were visibly shaken by the verdict. Our team has been closely watching this case of course for years now.

They could scarcely find the words and yet found the courage to speak their minds and from their hearts, the anguish all of this happening. The jurors ultimately only deliberated for about four and a half hours, maybe five that began yesterday.

They had to pick a foreman first they were done by five o’clock and by the time they arrived today, the decision had been made said one dad today Tony Montalto whose daughter Gina Rose was among those massacred on Valentine’s Day 2018, quote:-

The monster who killed them gets to live another day.”

You’re looking at the video of the scene as it played out today Parkland families are again stunned by what happened here that there would be no unanimous death penalty recommendations that at least one juror perhaps more found that the arguments about the shooter’s mental health problems about his abuse and neglect over his lifetime were compelling enough to say they would not support a death penalty recommendation.

It only took one there may have been more but at the end of the day, it will be life in prison for the convicted shooter. Another dad Fred Guttenberg, and his daughter Jaime Guttenberg, were among the 17 victims on Valentine’s Day 2018.

Here’s what he had to say in part.

We are all in this position now of doing the work that we do around this country to keep this from happening to another family. And this decision today only makes it more likely that the next mass shooting will be attempted.”

Again, Fred Guttenberg, and his daughter, Fred Guttenberg among the victims, these are families who today feel the jury failed them in their words, who, from the outset of this massacre, in the immediate aftermath, began to learn how a system they said had failed them.

How law enforcement schools all the way up to the FBI had missed red flags about the shooter that might do let them know that he was prone to and bent eventually on violence.

And then now all the way four and a half plus years later saying that a system that in their mind was built to handle cases like this their argument this day rings foreign why’d you heard so many of them speak emotionally though, those of you who joined us throughout the day.

The families at least say from their perspective, a system that if there ever was one meant to issue a death penalty recommendation, they said it should have been here. They say in their minds they have been failed yet again by a system.

Photos Courtesy:- Inside Edition, CNN