Video shows chilling amount of research Parkland killer Nikolas Cruz did on school massacres for YEARS
![Dr Charles L Scott, a forensic psychiatrist with the University of California, continued his testimony and included videos of his examinations with the Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz (Law and Crime/Youtube screenshot)](http://d2a0gza273xfgz.cloudfront.net/586738/uploads/3b8275a0-439f-11ed-84d7-c16132ec27b6_1200_630.jpeg)
FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA: On Monday, a forensic psychiatrist from the University of California named Dr Charles L Scott continued his testimony about the symptoms of sociopathy that were exhibited by the Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz. In this portion of Cruz's testimony, he mentioned that he told a prosecution psychiatrist that he first started thinking about committing a mass murder when he was in middle school.
According to Scott, Nikolas Cruz's academic history, beginning with preschool and continuing up to the time of the crime, demonstrates that he had the "ability to control" his actions when "he wanted to." In addition, Scott asserted that Cruz's "premeditated acts of aggression" and interests are indicative of anti-social personality disorder, not fetal alcohol spectrum illnesses as the defense had contended, reported WPLG Local 10.
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Scott said after mentioning Cruz’s racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic comments, “They disparage others. They have a lack of remorse about harming or hurting other people."
The jury learned this information via videotaped discussions that were shown on Monday in court during his sentence hearing. Eventually, Cruz started undertaking a thorough study on prior assassins in order to understand their strategies and faults in order to create his own plans. During an interview with Dr Charles Scott that took place in March, Nikolas Cruz revealed that five years before he killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, 2018, he read about the murder of 13 people at Colorado's Columbine High School in 1999, which is what initially sparked the idea of carrying out his own mass killing. Cruz explained to Scott how the events of Columbine, the murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech University in 2007, and the murder of 12 people in a movie theater in Colorado in 2012 all had a role in his own preparation.
"I studied mass murderers and how they did it," Cruz told Scott. "How they planned, what they got and what they used." He said he learned to watch for people coming around corners to stop him, to keep some distance from people as he fired, to attack "as fast as possible" and, in the earlier attacks, "the police didn't do anything." Cruz said, "I should have the opportunity to shoot people for about 20 minutes."
Cruz, 24, pled guilty to the murders he committed in a seven-minute attack on February 14, 2018. The trial is merely to determine whether he would be executed or given a life sentence without the possibility of parole. To execute Cruz, all seven men and five women on the jury must agree. A lesser conviction would result in an automatic life sentence.
The footage of Scott's sessions with Cruz was shown to the jury in March at the Broward County prison by the prosecutors. Cruz communicated willingly with Scott about the attack that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine's Day in 2018.
“The evidence is extremely strong that this was planned, premeditated, thought out,” Scott said later adding that Cruz chose Valentine’s Day, “because he had no one to love and no one to love him.” In an interview with Scott on March 2, Cruz said that he began researching school shootings at the age of 13 or 14. Cruz was handcuffed at the time. “I studied mass murderers and how they did it, like their plans, what they got and what they used,” Cruz told Scott. When asked how he was going to carry out the massacre at MSD, Cruz detailed his plans. He said he "wore a maroon Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps shirt as a 'disguise' to 'blend in.'"