He had been assigned to special education since kindergarten after being diagnosed with emotional and developmental problems and a speech disability. “He couldn’t stand up for himself,” Rodriguez said. Lynn Rodriguez said that when she taught Cruz in 20, he had difficulty staying on task and was “very small” for his age, leading to him being bullied at school, on the bus and by his younger brother at home. Lynda Cruz died of pneumonia four months before the shootings.īefore Browd’s testimony was played, his third and fourth grade special education teacher testified that he was a sad and sometimes violent and disruptive student who didn’t make friends with his classmates. So after three weeks, Lynda Cruz traded in the BMW for another van, Browd said. For example, Lynda and Roger Cruz traded in the family’s van for a BMW SUV when their oldest son was 4, but he didn’t like it because he couldn’t stand up and move like he could in the van. She said his mother didn’t set boundaries for him. She said Lynda Cruz had dreamed of being a mother so went through a private attorney to adopt Nikolas and, two years, later his half-brother Zachary. Finai Browd, who was friends with Cruz’s late adoptive mother Lynda Cruz, described the shocking moment that Cruz witnessed his father Roger’s sudden death from a heart attack in 2004. She said Lynda Cruz had four miscarriages before she was able to adopt Nikolas in 1998 when she was 49 and her husband 61. She and Lynda Cruz became best friends while working at a New York insurance company in the 1980s, with they and their husbands moving to Florida at approximately the same time so they could remain near each other. His public defenders played video recorded testimony of Browd, who has health issues that prevented her from coming to court. Trying to overcome the emotional, gruesome and graphic evidence and testimony the prosecution presented over three weeks as it laid out the killings, the defense has spent the first five days of its case trying to show that from the time he was conceived in the womb of a crack-smoking, hard-drinking prostitute he was put on a road that created a killer. For the former Stoneman Douglas student to received a death sentence, the jury must be unanimous. A seven-man, five-woman jury will decide whether he is sentenced to death or life without parole. Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October to murdering 14 students and three staff members at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb.
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