FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Even after he was shot, Alex Dworet tried not to believe the Parkland tragedy was real.
Dworet was one of 17 injured in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018. His brother, Nicholas Dworet, was one of the 17 killed. Alex described his experiences that day during the second day of the trial to determine if the killer is executed.
He said he was in class when he heard loud bangs but didn’t think much of it initially.
“Then I just remember feeling sensation on the back of my head, like a hot sensation,” Dworet testified on Tuesday.
“While I was sitting there, I was trying not to think this is real. This is fake. I’m just trying not to process it,” he said. “I’m trying not to freak out.”
He looked in front of him and saw the lifeless body of his classmate Alex Schachter, a 14-year-old.
“It was starting to get real,” he said.
Another shooting victim from the same class, William Olsen, also testified he saw that Alex Schachter was not moving.
“I realize there’s blood all over me. I can hear the shots still. I hear them get farther away,” he testified. “I ended up on the floor in front of the teacher’s desk. I don’t know how I got there.”
At this point, Olsen realized he too had been shot.
Jurors also heard from a student who was warned by killer Nikolas Cruz to “get out of here” because “things are going to get bad.”
Christopher McKenna, who was a freshman at the time, testified he passed Cruz in a hallway preparing a rifle. After he was warned, he ran to the senior parking lot, where he saw Aaron Feis, a campus monitor who was later killed in the mass shooting.
“I was hearing shots. I was in the golf cart driving to the 1300 building,” he said.
He said he ran to a friend’s house and called his dad, who worked in law enforcement at the time.
He also identified Cruz in surveillance video that only jurors saw. As he stood to point at the defendant in the courtroom, Cruz looked back at him.
Jurors watched several surveillance videos on Tuesday.
Defense lawyer David Wheeler argued against the introduction of Tuesday’s video, saying it has value as evidence but it is prejudicial, meaning it’s so horrific that it will overwhelm the jury emotionally.
“The question is whether it’s (necessary) to prove an aggravator,” Wheeler said.
Prosecutor Jeff Marcus argued the videos are needed to prove the “heinous, atrocious and cruel” nature of the killing.
Judge Elizabeth Scherer ruled in favor of the prosecutors, meaning the videos were shown to jurors almost as soon as the testimony began on Tuesday.
The videos, which contain no sound, are not being shown to the public.
The defense has been largely silent with the jurors in the room, but the lawyers speak up in their absence, mostly arguing to preserve their objections to the proceedings. Any one of those objections can end up as an issue for appeals courts to consider in the future.
During the playback of the graphic surveillance videos, all jurors were focused on the screens. As the video progressed, two woman raised their hands in front of their mouths, fingers opened, one with a slight tremble. Later, four held their hands to their faces, one looking troubled and the others pensive.
A man on the jury alternated his gaze from the screen to Cruz, who was looking down, occasionally glancing to his right and talking with Wheeler.
The trial began on Monday, with jurors watching harrowing cellphone videos taken by students at the high school, where Cruz killed 17 people on Feb. 14, 2018. He pleaded guilty to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder; the penalty trial is for a jury to determine whether he gets life in prison without parole or the death penalty.
———
