Penalty phase to determine if 23-year-old mass murderer is executed or given life sentence.

By Terry Spencer, Associated Press

Nikolas Cruz pleaded guilty Wednesday to murdering 17 people during a rampage at his former high school in Parkland, Florida, leaving a jury to decide whether he will be executed for one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings.

Relatives of the victims who sat in the courtroom and watched the hearing via Zoom broke down in tears and held hands across families as Cruz entered his pleas and later apologized for his crimes.

“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 daughter was 14 and sitting outside her classroom when Cruz shot her at close range numerous times. “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.”

The guilty pleas will set the stage for a penalty trial in which 12 jurors will determine whether Cruz, 23, should be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole. Given the case’s notoriety, Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer plans to screen thousands of prospective jurors. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Jan. 4.

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 scoffed at Cruz’s statement as they left the courtroom, saying it 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.”

Anthony Borges, a former Stoneman Douglas student who was shot five times and severely wounded, told reporters after the hearing that he accepted Cruz’s apology, but noted that it was not up to him to decide the confessed murderer’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.

Following 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 rampage 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.

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 liberal 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 reportedly shows many of the killings in graphic detail. 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, Judge Scherer will make the final decision.

The post Nikolas Cruz pleads guilty to 2018 Parkland school massacre appeared first on World Israel News.

As the State of Israel prepares to celebrate 70 years of independence, a leading Israeli volunteer organization is providing “ambucycles” in honor of the Parkland school shooting victims.

By: Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

As part of the Jewish state’s Independence Day celebrations next Thursday, a leading Israeli organization will oversee the donation of a whole new fleet of 70 specialized ambulance-motorcycles (“ambucycles”).

Nine of the new ambucycles were donated in response to the tragedy of the mass shooting in a Florida high school in February. The Jewish community of Palm Beach, Florida raised the money “to leave a legacy of lifesaving for the children and teachers killed in the horrific attack,” according to the organization’s statement. Five of the 17 students and staff members killed by a white supremacist at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were Jewish.

The ambucycles will be numbered 1948 through 2018, one for each year of modern Israel’s existence, and donors can choose to fund a specific year that means something special to them. The dedication ceremony will take place in Bat Yam, in the presence of the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi David Lau, and Professor Alan Dershowitz, the well-known law professor and author who has defended and supported Israel on countless occasions in public forums.

United Hatzala (UH), the free Israeli volunteer-based Emergency Medical Services organization is organizing the ambucycle donations.

Dershowitz donated part of one of the ambucycles in honor of his 80th birthday. “I can’t imagine a charity more worthy of my support than United Hatzalah,” he said. “The organization and its volunteers are leading the way in innovation and are often the first to arrive in cases of medical emergencies and at the scenes of acts of terrorism.”

UH boasts a network of nearly 5,000 volunteer medics, paramedics, doctors and nurses that, according to founder Eli Beer, has allowed it to achieve a 90-second response time in dense urban areas.

“What we have done with our model of combining ambucycles with our volunteer responders, is created a social innovation that some have called a ‘flash mob of lifesaving,’” he said in a UH statement.

The ambucycle is not the only vehicle the organization has that allows its first responders to get to an emergency in a hurry, even through the worst traffic – or the roughest terrain. They also have electric bicycles and Rescue ATVs (Ambutractors), whose four-wheel drives can get to victims in forests, deserts, and mountains.

Since its founding in 2006, United Hatzalah volunteers have responded to over 2.5 million emergency calls throughout the country. Their members come from every community and religion in Israel.

The post Parkland victims honored with new Israeli ‘ambucycles’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Max Schachter reads a poem written by his son Alex at CNN’s town hall with students, parents, lawmakers and the NRA. Alex was one of the 17 victims in the Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

The post WATCH: Father of Florida shooting victim reads son’s emotional poem about life appeared first on World Israel News.

Chabad Rabbi Avraham Friedman talks to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about his work assisting the grief-stricken families in Parkland, Florida and how the victims’ families are coping in the aftermath of the horrific tragedy.

The post WATCH: Florida rabbi attends to shooting victims and their families appeared first on World Israel News.