Lynda cruz4/8/2023 ![]() ![]() The young man has been described as lost, lonely, and violent. Cruz's troubled life is coming into sharper focus, through police and school records and interviews with friends, family and former classmates. He confessed to shooting 33 former classmates, coaches and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, the school he was kicked out of in his junior year. Lynda and Roger Cruz knew their new son had challenges, but neither lived to see what he was capable of.Ĭruz sits in the Broward County main jail. And he never made it to 20 in the outside world. By the time he was 16, he was preoccupied with wars, death, and killing, school records reveal. By the time he was 6, he'd suffered the trauma of witnessing his father's death. She was elated.īy the time he was 3, he was diagnosed with developmental delays. A day earlier, prosecutors said, her son had opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.When Nikolas Jacob Cruz was born in South Florida 19 years ago, his adoptive mother Lynda was in the delivery room to watch him emerge. Court documents show that a petition to begin administration of her estate was filed on Feb. The second estate belonged to Lynda Cruz, who died three months before the shooting. Cruz’s mother, Lynda, asked the court to “reopen and continue the administration of an estate wherein Nikolas Cruz may be a beneficiary.” The Miami Herald reported in September that Roger Cruz died when Nikolas Cruz was 5. Cruz, had been pending since at least December 2016, when a lawyer for Mr. Cruz “may be a beneficiary in probate matters” related to two separate estates. Cruz’s case in February 2018, days after the massacre at the high school. The public defender’s office was assigned to Mr. ![]() “Whether or not defendant will ultimately receive any monies from his mother’s estate is unknown.” “Defendant may at some point become a potential beneficiary to the estate of his deceased mother, although the administration of the estate is still pending,” the public defender wrote at the time. ![]() That gave him access to public defense services even though he was not technically impoverished. ![]() Cruz should be considered effectively indigent because he could not access most of that money until the life insurance policy was paid out. The public defender’s office argued at the time that, despite that nest egg, Mr. That included $1,000 in cash and $2,200 in Microsoft stock, along with what looks in retrospect like a modest future windfall: “an entitlement to a $25,000 life insurance policy from a deceased parent.” Cruz stood silently last year when he was indicted on 17 counts of premeditated murder in the first degree and 17 counts of attempted murder in the first degree, which in Florida effectively amounts to a not guilty plea.Ĭourt documents filed by the public defender’s office last April estimated Mr. His public defense team said last year that he would plead guilty in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of parole, but prosecutors said last March that they planned to seek the death penalty in the case. Seventeen more were injured in the shooting, which scarred an upscale area of South Florida and sparked a nationwide push for gun control that has so far achieved mixed results. 14, 2018, rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., which left 14 students and three staff members dead. Cruz, but he was one of two children adopted by his parents. It also did not say who was splitting the money with Mr. Cruz’s parents had bought the life insurance policy, which will pay him more than $430,000. The court filing did not say which of Mr. “The defendant and undersigned counsel were previously unaware of this entitlement.” “It has come to the attention of undersigned counsel that Nikolas Cruz is a beneficiary in a MetLife life insurance policy and is entitled to half of a death benefit valued at $864,929.17 as of April 23, 2019,” the public defender’s office wrote. Cruz, 20, had expected the payout to be so large. But on Wednesday, his lawyers said that neither they nor Mr. Cruz received public defense services last year, his lawyers wrote in court filings that he was a possible beneficiary in the estates of his parents, Lynda and Roger Cruz. Cruz had been awarded half of a life insurance policy worth almost $865,000. The public defender’s office representing Nikolas Cruz, who has been charged with killing 17 people in the Parkland school shooting, asked to be removed from the case on Wednesday after learning that Mr. ![]()
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