FORT LAUDERDALE – 4 years just before Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 individuals, therapists at another university wrote a letter to his psychiatrist saying he was fixated on guns and dreamed of killing some others and getting lined in blood, testimony at his penalty trial showed Thursday.
Dr. Brett Negin, testifying for the protection, stated he never received it.
Negin and another psychiatrist who taken care of Cruz in the 10 years primary up to the Feb. 14, 2018, massacre at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High University testified throughout Thursday’s abbreviated court docket session about the various remedies he was supplied for consideration deficit hyperactivity disorder and other difficulties, but the two reported beneath cross-evaluation they hardly ever observed anything that would have led them to think he was capable of mass murder.
But Negin, who handled Cruz from 2012 into August 2017, was then proven by the protection a June 2014 letter prepared to him by a psychiatrist and therapist at Cross Creek College, a campus that learners with emotional and behavioral problems go to.
Dr. Nyrma N. Ortiz and therapist Rona O’Connor Kelly’s two-site letter tackled to Negin suggests Cruz, then 15, was suffering from extraordinary temper swings, including, “He is ordinarily pretty irritable and reactive.” They said he is “inappropriately” obsessed with guns and the army, defiant, verbally intense toward his teachers, paranoid and places the blame on other folks for the problems he makes.
“At property, he proceeds to be aggressive and destructive with nominal provocation,” the two wrote. He ruined a television immediately after dropping a video activity, punched holes in walls and applied sharp objects to lower up the home furnishings and carve holes in the toilet. He has a hatchet that he makes use of to chop a dead tree in the back again yard, but his mom documented she could no longer obtain it.
Cruz shared at university “he dreams of killing many others and is coated in blood.”
The two claimed he had been assessed for hospitalization, but that hardly ever happened. They claimed they had been writing Negin so he could regulate Cruz’s medication.
Negin testified Thursday he under no circumstances been given the letter and no 1 adopted up with him when he didn’t reply.
Negin also testified that in 2013 he wrote a letter for Cruz’s mom supporting his voluntary hospitalization. That also never transpired.
Place of work quantities for Ortiz were disconnected. O’Connor Kelly did not quickly answer to an e-mail Thursday trying to find comment.
The defense is making an attempt to clearly show that Cruz, 23, experienced a lengthy background of psychological health problems that had been by no means totally dealt with. He pleaded responsible in October to the murders – the demo is only to come to a decision whether he is sentenced to loss of life or life with no parole.
The protection is striving to prevail over the prosecution’s circumstance, which finished earlier this month. It showcased surveillance video of Cruz, then 19, mowing down college students and staff with an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle as he stalked a 3-story setting up for seven minutes, images of the aftermath and a jury take a look at to the building.
For Cruz to receive a death sentence, the seven-person, five-girl jury have to be unanimous. If just one juror votes for life, that will be his sentence.
