“She told me later in time, his mother was an addict,” Ms Fischer said Lynda told her of Woodard. When she gave birth to Zachary, Lynda and Roger brought him home as their second son and Cruz’s younger brother.Įven as a baby and toddler, experts began to notice that Cruz was intellectually and physically behind other children.Īnne Fischer, the director of the pre-school Young Minds Learning Center which Cruz attended from the age of one, testified that he had social and communication difficulties and bit other children. When Cruz was less than a year old, Woodard became pregnant again. Lynda took Cruz home to live with her and her husband Roger. Woodard had placed him up for adoption and his adoptive mother Lynda Cruz was in the delivery room at his birth. While his birth mother’s substance abuse may have had a lasting impact, his relationship with her ended as soon as he was born. “I don’t think I have ever seen - I know I have never seen - so much alcohol consumed by a pregnant woman,” he said, adding that he has studied more than 1,000 people with prenatal alcohol exposure in his 50-year career. Because of that his brain is irretrievably broken,” she said.ĭr Kenneth Jones, who is regarded as one of the nation’s top FASD experts, testified that he has “never seen” a woman abuse alcohol while pregnant as much as Cruz’s biological mother. ![]() Ms McNeill said that Cruz’s “brain is broken” from this prenatal exposure to alcohol. FASD are conditions caused by an individual being exposed to alcohol in the womb before birth and they can often lead to both physical problems and behavioural and learning problems, such as learning disabilities, hyperactive behaviour, and poor reasoning and judgment skills. The defence has said that this caused Cruz to suffer from fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). The identity of his father remains unknown.Īccording to testimony from her daughter Danielle Woodard, Cruz was “polluted” in the womb as their biological mother continued to abuse alcohol and drugs and smoke during her pregnancy. In opening statements, lead public defender Melisa McNeill boldly admitted that his team has “no defence for this crime” and that Cruz is the “one person responsible for all the pain and suffering” caused by his actions that day in Parkland, Florida.Ĭruz was born on 24 September 1998 to Brenda Woodard, an alcoholic and drug addict who was living on the streets and working as a prostitute. Having pleaded guilty to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder over the Valentine’s Day 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, 12 jurors must now decide whether to sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole or to death. ![]() These so-called risk factors have all come into focus in recent weeks as Cruz’s team of public defenders tries to convince a jury of his peers that his life should be spared. There’s no one thing that you can say that is the reason but, together, a perfect storm of risk factors can give the means, motive and opportunity.” “For any given person there is a causal explanation, a link… and, on average, people who become mass shooters or are very violent have had these experiences or risk factors. “Without any one of those problems, it may never have happened,” Abigail Marsh, professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at Georgetown University, tells The Independent. Nikolas Cruz’s mother described him as a ‘sore loser’ and believed something was ‘very wrong with him’.Parkland shooter once went on ‘killing spree’ of all the toads in the neighbourhood, court hears. ![]()
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