The Florida shooting suspect told a detective that the demons in his head told him to kill people, in an interview on the day of the incident. Seventeen people were killed and 16 wounded at Marjory Stoneman High School on Feb. 14.
Cruz said there were demons, or voices, in his head and that the voices started getting worse when his mother died. Cruz, who was adopted, had already lost his adopted father in 2005, which is when the voices started originally.
Asked what the voices told him, Cruz said: “Burn. Kill. Destroy.”
Asked what they would want him to burn, kill, and destroy, Cruz said: “Anything.”
He later said that the voice told him to “hurt people in general.”
Cruz said he had gone to a park a week prior to the school shooting and planned to start shooting people there, but he was able to stop himself from doing it.
The detective tells Cruz that “everybody’s got a good and a bad side,” but the teenager doesn’t seem to believe him. “Do they really?” he asked.
Many portions of the manuscript are redacted, dozens of pages.
Cruz also said he had tried to kill himself recently, and disclosed he regularly used “a lot” of drugs that “no one knew about,” including marijuana and Xanax.
Cruz said he had not taken any drugs the day of the shooting.
He also told the detective that he had originally purchased the AR-15 to “feel safe,” and that prior to the Parkland shooting had only shot it twice, both times in his mother’s garage.
Cruz also said he had no friends and that he'd left school after getting into a fight with another boy over his girlfriend at the time.
Judge Elizabeth Scherer decided to make the transcript public after media outlets pressed for its release under Florida’s law requiring most evidence be made public once it’s turned over by prosecutors to the defense.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
