No end in sight for survivors of the Parkland school massacre

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The Parkland gunman’s guilty plea this week brought a swift end to the most predictable part of the legal drama surrounding the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but it left far more business unfinished.

There are still legal arguments and hearings and a trial to determine whether Nikolas Cruz lives or dies. There are unresolved social and political arguments about how to prevent something like the Parkland massacre from happening again.

And there is still the site of the terror, the building the gunman entered on Valentine’s Day 2018, committed to killing. The hallways he stalked. The stained floors. The shattered windows. The vacant, sealed and silent reminder of South Florida’s darkest day.

For some, it is impossible to expect closure as long as Stoneman Douglas’ 1200 building stands.

“In a perverse way, it has come to be the only monument we have on school grounds, where all those children and selfless teachers and coaches passed on,” said Eric Edwards, whose three children attended the school, including one who is now a sophomore. “So it’s sacred ground, too, although I still view it with repulsion and can’t wait for it to come down and be replaced with a fitting tribute to those we lost, and to all that was lost on that day.”

The freshmen who attended Stoneman Douglas on the day of the shooting graduated in June. For the current student body, the mass shooting is not something they lived through.

“It’s just like it was in 2018,” said senior Logan Rubenstein, who became a Stoneman Douglas student six months after the shooting. “It’s kind of a time capsule that always reminds us of what happened.”

But there are still teachers who long to see the edifice removed.

“It needs to go,” said Melissa Falkowski, an English teacher who leads the school’s Faculty Council. “The building is a hard physical representation of what happened.” She said that’s a common feeling among most teachers.

“To be honest, I just don’t look,” said Stoneman Douglas TV production teacher Eric Garner. “It’s still an active crime scene.”

And that is why it still stands.

Prosecutors originally intended to have trial jurors walk through the building, following in the gunman’s footsteps to establish that his actions were premeditated and deserving of a first-degree murder conviction. Now that Cruz’s guilt is officially established, prosecutors are still planning the walk-through. Only now, the sole purpose is to show that executing the shooter is a just punishment.

“It’s very triggering to see the building and know that’s where my daughter was killed,” said school board member Lori Alhadeff, whose daughter, Alyssa, was one of the slain victims. “But I’m very mindful that a jury needs to walk through the building for the ultimate goal of the death penalty. They need to be able to see things, smell things and get the entire picture of what happened on Feb. 14.”

Once the sentencing trial is over, she said, she wants the building to come down.

“I want the school district to be ready to go and not go through some long drawn-out process,” Alhadeff said. “I want them to be prepared, with all their ducks in a row once they get the green light to expedite this as quickly as possible.”

All of this depends on how long it takes the legal process to reach its next milestone, whether it’s a sentence of life or death.

Attorneys are scheduled to go to court Tuesday to wade through the mountain of motions that have been filed in the case and determine which ones are no longer necessary now that guilt is no longer in legal question. Many of the arguments made by prosecutors and defense lawyers are just as relevant now as they ever were, including the language that can be used in court to refer to the defendant and the extent to which the defense can rely on the education, mental health and justice systems’ failures as mitigating factors.

Broward Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer has set Jan. 4 as the first day of jury selection, expecting to go through between 100 and 200 potential jurors a day just to weed out those who know too much about the case or who cannot be fair. A second phase of selection will determine who will be tasked with making the decision.

Once the jury is picked, prosecutors will present their case for the death penalty, followed by the defense, which is likely to focus on the guilty plea and the defendant’s mental health.

The victims and family members are not unanimous in their desire to see the gunman executed. “That’s not my right. I’m not God,” said survivor Anthony Borges. “My decision is to change the world. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else. It hurts. It really hurts.”

If one juror agrees, Cruz will live. Under Florida law, the judge cannot impose death unless the jury’s recommendation is unanimous. But even if the jury recommends death, a judge can impose a life sentence instead.

While timelines are difficult to predict, it will almost certainly take several months between jury selection and the judge’s ruling. The school district roughly estimates demolition of the 1200 building at some point in 2022. A memorial is already being developed nearby and likely will be expanded after the building is razed, Alhadeff said. It will include pictures and comments from loved ones about the 17 who died.

Until then, the families of the victims are bracing for everything except the one thing no one can promise — closure.

“I don’t think there’s closure to this,” said Tom Hoyer, father of victim Luke Hoyer. “This is not something you ever get over. You just learn to live with it.”

The only fitting conclusion, he said, would be for the gunman to be deprived of the notoriety he once craved.

“We want him dead. We want him forgotten.”