FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — He will be a number.
All inmates at the Florida Department of Corrections get one — murderers, burglars, car thieves, kidnappers, rapists. All 82,000 inmates in Florida prisons get assigned a six-digit identification number.
When he leaves Fort Lauderdale’s main jail and enters the Florida State Prison system after sentencing next week, confessed Parkland gunman Nikolas Cruz will cease to be Broward County’s most notorious inmate. He will not join the 302 inmates on death row, with their private cells, personal televisions and no work requirements.
Instead Cruz, 24, will be one of more than 15,000 inmates serving time because they took another life. That he took 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and wounded 17 more, will be of little consequence outside the prison walls. He will eventually lose the asset he appeared to value most — his fame.
Inside, it’s part of what will make him a popular target, according to experts in the Florida prison system.
“If I wasn’t on death row, I would have just been forgotten,” said former inmate Seth Penalver, once convicted of a triple murder and sentenced to death, only to have his conviction overturned and win acquittal at retrial. “There’s probably thousands of other people that have life sentences that no one cares about. I would have just been another one of them.”
A Broward jury spared Cruz’s life earlier this month, failing to reach a unanimous vote that would have condemned him to death row. The decision outraged many family members of those Cruz murdered on Valentine’s Day 2018, with some openly longing for “prison justice” to take the law into its own hands.
As a rule, the victims’ families do not speak Cruz’s name. Notoriety is what he seeks, and they refuse to contribute to it.
“Today he got everything he wanted, while our loved ones are in the cemetery,” Max Schachter, father of slain victim Alex Schachter, said after the verdict was read Oct. 13.
But the shooter’s notoriety will fade, said Ron McAndrew, a retired Florida prison warden who is now an expert witness on the corrections system. It’s just a matter of time.
“They don’t get the comforts of death row in general population, but he’ll still be popular for some time,” McAndrew said. “Hundreds of women will want to marry him, from all over the world. They will write to him, send him money.”
And that, along with his crime, will put a target on his back. Even his defense lawyer, Melisa McNeill, alluded to prison justice during her closing argument, urging jurors to spare Cruz’s life while hinting at prison justice if he gets a life sentence, which would last until he dies “by natural causes or whatever else could possibly happen to him while he’s in prison.”
Prison justice is likely, McAndrew said. Its severity is not predictable.
“He’s a pretty small guy,” said McAndrew. “This is the kind of guy that predators, and there are predators throughout the system, will be drawn to. They will offer him protection.”
The protection, McAndrew said, will come at a cost — Cruz’s benefactors will be expected to divert at least a portion of their generosity to his “protector’s” commissary account, which inmates use to buy meals and other legal comforts.
And if the money doesn’t show up? “That would be a bad day for Nikolas,” he said. “These guys are predators. They use violence.”
None of that is guaranteed, McAndrew said. Violent incidents behind prison walls have decreased since the federal Prison Rape and Elimination Act of 2003 was passed, but an inmate is still more likely to be a victim of assault, or worse, than someone who is not incarcerated.
From 2017 to 2022, there were 2,399 inmate deaths, according to the Florida Department of Corrections. Only 81 were homicides. Suicides accounted for 97 deaths, and accidents were responsible for 229. The overwhelming majority of deaths, 1,843, were by natural causes.
Eventually, McAndrew said, the fame subsides. With no pending execution and no specter of appeals or retrials to keep the defendant’s name in the news, there will always be those who remember, but there will also be those who never knew.
“It will be a generation before people forget his name,” McAndrew said. “But he’s young, and he’ll be in prison for a long time after that.”
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