Cruz jurors can visit bullet-riddled site at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, judge rules

Jurors will be allowed to tour the shuttered, bullet-riddled freshman building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High where Nikolas Cruz fatally killed 17 people and wounded 17 more.

The decision from Broward Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer means the jury in Cruz’s death-penalty case, which started on Monday, will eventually tour a crime scene where blood stains and bullet holes remain more than four years later.

The building has been locked but kept largely intact since the massacre on Valentine’s Day of 2018. The jury visit will clear the way for the 1200 building — a horrible reminder of Florida’s deadliest school shooting — to be demolished by the school district.

Testimony in the trial is set to begin on May 31, with jury selection expected to last nearly two months. The lengthy process began Monday.

Scherer, in a ruling signed Thursday, agreed that prosecutors “would assist the jury” in analyzing whether the state has proved the “aggravating” factors that merit the death penalty.

Among those factors: that Cruz acted in such a way that was “heinous, atrocious and cruel” and he “knowingly created a great risk of death to many persons.”

“There is no one video, photograph, poster, film, anything, that captures what the ... building is,” Broward prosecutor Carolyn McCann told the judge last week. “The jury has to know the footsteps, the distance, the perspective, the visual acuity the defendant had to have.”

The Broward Public Defender’s Office, however, insisted that the site visit — rare in criminal trials, but legally permissible — would only inflame the jury’s emotions unnecessarily. The jurors “don’t need to see all of those horrible things,” defense lawyer Melisa McNeill told the judge.

This story was originally published April 4, 2022 at 6:00 PM.