On the fourth day of Cruz’s judgment, Wilford testified that he had walked to nearby McDonald’s after evacuating from the chaotic scene of the school waiting for his mother to pick him up. Cruz sat at the table with him and asked if he could ride-Wilford turned it down.
Immediately after the shooting, Cruz went to Wal-Mart, where he bought a drink on the subway and then headed to McDonald’s, where Wilford was sitting inside.
“He just sat next to me,” Wilford, a freshman, said in his testimony. “I didn’t think much about it. I panicked. I was just trying to go home.”
When Wilford set out to meet his arriving mother, Cruz asked for a ride.
“He was pretty sticky to it, and I said no,” Wilford said. “When I tried to go home, her sister didn’t answer the phone, was nervous and panicked. Her bowel wasn’t working well.”
The prosecution offered more witnesses on Thursday, including managers of both the subway and McDonald’s, focusing on Cruz’s actions after the shooting. The police officer who arrested Cruz also testified.
Officers explain what they saw that day
To conclude the first week of Cruz’s judgment, prosecutor Mike Sats summoned three law enforcement officers to the stand on Friday about who they saw in school when they responded to the shootings. I testified.
Broward County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Richard van der Eames testified that when he arrived at the scene, he saw smoke, dust and a child dead on the ground.
He explained the classroom checks and tidying up, saw student Anthony Borges trying to say something at the end of the hallway, and said, “He keeps trying to raise his hand to see that he is alive. “.
The jury also displayed an image from Van der Eames’ body camera. The camera shows the bodies identified as Cara Loughran and Meadow Pollack, two students who died that day.
Detective David Alfins of the Coral Springs Police Department testified about how he saw the vest and rifle landing on the third floor near Jamie Gattenberg’s body.
“I checked her vital signs breathing and pulse, but found nothing,” he said.
Guttenberg was 14 years old when she died. Jaime’s father, Fred Gattenberg, sat down in a court gallery and looked down while Alfins testified about her daughter.
Alfins also had to move to see how student Joaquin Oliver’s corpse was blocking the bathroom door and that no one was in the bathroom. I talked about Taka. He also said he saw another dead victim, student Peter Wang, “falling to the ground.”
More images of these victims were shown to the jury before the court rested for lunch.
The prosecutor asked a group of twelve juries to sentence Cruz to death, but his lawyer demanded life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Sara Weisfeldt of CNN contributed to this report.
Source: www.cnn.com
