Vengeance and Mercy in Parkland

From an award-winning journalist that Bob Woodward calls “one of the truly great reporters working today” comes the searing inside account of a legal team’s effort to spare the life of Nikolas Cruz, the nineteen-year-old mass murderer.

On Valentine’s Day 2018, Nikolas Cruz opened fire on his former classmates at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing seventeen students and faculty in cold blood. It was a devastating national tragedy, and unlike so many school shooters, Cruz lived to face the consequences. He would plead guilty, but the prosecution, working closely with the victims’ families, wanted him to pay with his life.

Vengeance and Mercy in Parkland: The Trials of a School Shooter follows the idealistic members of Cruz’s defense team as they work, despite threats against their lives, to reconstruct their client’s boyhood and make a longshot argument for mercy. Cruz, profoundly neurologically damaged by his birth mother’s drinking, had been identified as odd or ill or both from the time he was a toddler: socially isolated, intellectually challenged, obsessed with guns and violent video games, explosively aggressive, desperate for friends and approval. Through the story of his life, his terrible crimes, and his trial, Vengeance and Mercy in Parkland asks what justice looks like, for the victims and the perpetrator, in this most extreme of cases.