Most of the jurors wanted Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz to be executed for massacring 17 people in 2018, but three of the 12 voted against the death penalty, the jury foreman revealed to CBS Miami on Thursday.
The foreman, Benjamin Thomas, said that, initially, there was just one staunch holdout who said she’d never vote to execute Cruz because she believed him to be mentally ill. By Thursday morning—after deciding to “sleep on it” on Wednesday—Thomas said two other jurors decided to side with the woman, who he did not identify.
“There was one with a hard no—she couldn’t do it—and there was another two that ended up voting the same way,” Thomas said.
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Thomas said he voted in favor of the death penalty for Cruz, and that he was disappointed for the victims’ family members who were clearly devastated by the jury’s decision. Some stormed out of the courtroom, while others wiped away tears.
The decision, delivered after just a day of deliberations, clearly rattled some jurors, too. Some of their voices appeared to crack as they said “yes” to Judge Elizabeth Scherer to affirm their verdict.
“It didn’t go the way I would’ve liked or the way I voted, but that’s how the jury system works,” Thomas told CBS Miami. “Everybody gets their vote, everybody gets to decide. We went through all the evidence and some of the jurors just felt that was the appropriate sentence.”
In order for Cruz to be sentenced to death, the jury would have needed to be unanimous in its decision, according to Florida law. While the jury unanimously found that prosecutors had proved certain aggravating factors that warranted the death penalty—for example, that the crime was premeditated, “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel”—they did not unanimously find that those aggravating factors were outweighed by mitigating circumstances put forward by Cruz’s defense team.
Among those mitigating circumstances were evidence of his broken childhood, which included diagnoses of fetal alcohol spectrum and antisocial personality disorders.
As part of their defense, Cruz’s attorneys called on his biological sister, who told jurors that their mother—a crack addict and prostitute—drank and abused drugs regularly while pregnant with Cruz, dooming him from birth. Other witnesses, including former teachers and physiatrists, said Cruz would regularly lash out violently in school and displayed erratic behavior.
The trial, which spanned four months, was graphic at times and heartbreaking at others. Prosecutors played security footage of Cruz mowing down his former classmates in the hallway, and also called on 90 survivors to testify and recount their terrors from that day.
“A lot of things you never wanted to see and you never want to see again,” Thomas told CBS Miami.
Though his official sentencing isn't until Nov. 1, Cruz, now 24, is in line to serve a life sentence without the possibility for parole.
