A Florida judge formally sentenced Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz to life without parole, according to multiple reports.
Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz killed 14 students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018.
Last month, a jury failed to unanimously agree to the death penalty and sentenced the Parkland, Florida, school shooter to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty last October to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder in the 2018 shooting. During his sentencing trial, which began in July, prosecutors had sought the death penalty while defense attorneys asked for life in prison.
The judge sentenced Cruz to serve 17 life sentences with no possibility of parole with the sentences to run consecutively, according to CNN.
Shooter Pleads Guilty to All 17 Murders in 2018 Attack at Parkland, Fla., High School.
Cruz also received life in prison with a minimum of 20 years, for 14 of the 17 counts of attempted murder, and life without the possibility of parole for the other three counts of attempted murder, CNN reports. These will also run consecutively.
The formal sentencing comes after two days of victim statements read by the family members of the slain to Cruz.
“Real justice would be done if every family here were given a bullet and your AR-15 and we got to pick straws, and each one of us got to shoot one at a time at you, making sure that you felt every bit of it,” said Linda Beigel Schulman, according to AP. Schulman’s son, teacher Scott Beigel, was shot while leading students to safety in his classroom.
The school shooting became a catalyst for efforts to curb gun violence. Just five weeks after the massacre, a coalition that began with student survivors of the Parkland shooting staged the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., then launched a cross-country caravan to engage local communities in an effort to change gun laws.
Among the memorable moments from that rally, student Emma Gonzalez, who became one of Parkland’s most prominent voices after the shooting, stood silent for most of her time on stage as a timer counted the six minutes and 20 seconds it took the gunman to complete his carnage.
On the first day of the sentencing trial, prosecutors presented emotional student testimonies and harrowing recordings of screams, cries and gunshots captured by victims waiting to be rescued, multiple outlets reported at the time.
According to The Washington Post, some family members of victims left the courtroom while the recordings played. One woman pleaded for the video to be shut off, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.
While hiding in a classroom, former student Danielle Gilbert captured cell phone footage of the terror, which was presented by prosecutors, per The Post.
“We were just sitting kind of like sitting ducks,” Gilbert, who took the stand, said of the massacre. “We had no way to protect ourselves.”
The fatal victims of the attack were Luke Hoyer, 15; Alyssa Alhadeff, 14; Aaron Feis, 37; Jaime Guttenberg, 14; Martin Duque, 14; Chris Hixon, 49; Scott Beigel, 35; Nicholas Dworet, 17; Joaquin Oliver, 17; Cara Loughran, 14; Peter Wang, 15; Gina Montalto, 14; Carmen Schentrup, 16; Alaina Petty, 14; Meadow Pollack, 18; Alex Schachter, 14, and Helena Ramsey, 17. All died from fatal gunshot wounds.