“He didn’t blend in well with the other students. “Nikolas was very quiet, aloof,” she said. 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. He would stand there for a few hours and do this.” “He would stand at the window screaming and crying and I would have to yell at him to get away from the window,” Browd said. She said Cruz would have severe separation anxiety whenever his mother would leave him with her to run errands. She said that most children will stop if spoken to with a stern voice, but “he wouldn’t.” He would lay down and scream and cry, but not like a normal kid,” Browd said. “She was a great mom.”īut by the time Nikolas Cruz was 4, he was throwing tantrums that went beyond what children normally have, she said. “She was ecstatic, overjoyed,” Browd said. 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.īrowd said Lynda Cruz was a doting mother when she brought Nikolas home. 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. Previous testimony showed that Nikolas Cruz did not get grief counseling until four years after the 2004 death.Ĭruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October to murdering 14 students and three staff members at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. Lynda Cruz rushed into the den and found her husband had succumbed to a heart attack on the couch. “As clear as sunshine he said, ‘No, Daddy is dead,’” Browd said she was told by his mother. Lynda Cruz asked her son if he was upset because his father had yelled at him. (AP) - Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz’s attorneys presented more testimony Monday that the mass killer exhibited violent, disruptive and troubled behavior from his earliest years and, just before his sixth birthday, witnessed his adoptive father’s sudden death.įinai Browd, a close friend of Cruz’s late adoptive mother Lynda, said she was told Roger Cruz had been in the family’s den with Nikolas and his younger brother Zachary when he came running and crying past the kitchen where his mother was making lunch.
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