Also along the way, McKenna said he bumped into Nikolas Cruz on a staircase. He recalled that the teenager was wearing a maroon shirt and had a backpack over his shoulder. He was assembling an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. “He said, ‘Get out of here,’” McKenna recalled in his testimony Tuesday. “Things are about to get bad.” McKenna said he took off, speeding out of the building as the sound of gunfire rang out behind him. He quickly found Aaron Feis, an assistant football coach who doubled as a security guard, and alerted him to what was happening. Face wheeled McKenna to safety in a golf cart before returning to confront Cruz himself. Moments later, Feis was shot and killed in the hallway, where the bodies of Hoyer, 15, and Duque, 14, already lay. McKenna’s testimony Tuesday came on the second day of Cruz’s trial, as prosecutors try to convince jurors that he acted in a cold, calculated and cruel manner when he murdered 17 people on Feb. 14, 2018. If successful, Cruz could be sentenced to death. Prosecutors laid out Cruz’s actions during the shooting in painstaking detail before turning to testimony from survivors like McKenna and playing security footage of the carnage to jurors. Some jurors winced as they watched Cruz, who had been expelled from the school a year earlier, methodically mow down his former classmates, the Associated Press reported, with one juror shifting his gaze between the video and Cruz himself. The security footage, stitched together from 13 cameras to include each of Cruz’s shots, was played for jurors over the objections of defense attorneys. Cruz’s team argued that any probative value of the video he provided would be outweighed by the emotions it would evoke in jurors. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Scherer overruled the plea and the video was played for the 10 deputies and 12 jurors charged with determining whether Cruz, 23, who has already pleaded guilty, should be sentenced to death or life without parole. suspension. Also testifying Tuesday was student Ana Martins, who saw Hoyer and Duque trying to get away from Cruz before they were shot in the back. A friend pulled Martins away from a door to her classroom before she could open it for the pair. “They were scared,” he said. A third student who spoke, Alexander Dworet, said he initially thought the sound of gunshots was from a band playing. But then he felt a “hot sensation” on the back of his neck and realized what was happening, he said. “And then I just remember feeling a sensation in the back of my head, like a burning sensation,” Dworet testified. “I realized I was in danger, so I reacted as quickly as possible and tried to take cover somewhere.” Dworet said he felt the back of his head and his hand came back covered in blood—he had been grazed by a bullet. He survived the shooting, but his brother, 17-year-old Nicholas Dworet, was killed in the classroom across the hall.
Mike Stocker/Pool via Reuters
Dara Hass, the English teacher who had just given McKenna a bathroom pass, said three of her students were killed by Cruz. At first he thought the sound of fire alarms going off from Cruz’s rifle was part of a drill. Then she saw her student Alex Schachter collapse in his office. “The sound was so loud,” Hass said. “The students were screaming.” Hass said she told police who evacuated her classroom that she wanted to stay with those who could no longer leave—Schachter, Alaina Petty and Alyssa Alhadeff. All three had died at 14.
