Victim’s sister calls Cruz ‘remorseless monster’
Meghan Petty, sister of 14-year-old victim Alaina Petty, said she feels “betrayed by our justice system” with the jury rejecting the death penalty, and feels vulnerable sharing her pain with the public.
Alaina was shot multiple times, including through the heart, she said. Alaina died scared on a classroom floor, trying to hide behind a desk, she said.
“This entire ordeal has pushed me to my emotional, physical and mental limits. It will continue to do so for the rest of my life, even more so now that he has escaped being punished to the fullest extent of the law,” Petty said.
She called Nikolas Cruz a “remorseless monster who deserves no mercy.”
“This incredible darkness that he has within him -- which has been labeled here as mental illness -- is something that should be considered unacceptable and intolerable,” Petty said. But she said his life sentence sends the message to future shooters that “if one stretches the truth, they can get away with not only murder, but mass murder.”
“What we’ve been told here is 17 lives are worth nothing if you can make enough excuses for your actions,” she said.
Petty noted that she and Cruz are the same age.
“I could sit here and complain, as he has, that I’ve had a hard life. I was bullied in school. I’ve lost 15 family members and loved ones since I turned 9 to sickness, suicide, accident and now murder. Not once have I turned to ever hurting others … because I’m not a coward and I’m not weak,” she said.
"I will never get to say goodbye to her," she said of her sister. "She's never going to go to college, get a job, get married ... or even breathe again. But he'll be able to draw breath."
