Psychologist: School shooter didn't get consistent treatment

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- A psychologist who treated Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz when he was 8 years old testified Wednesday that Cruz was a “peculiar child” who had many behavioral and developmental issues but his widowed mother seemed overwhelmed and wasn’t consistent in her discipline or in getting him treatment.

Frederick Kravitz said he began treating Cruz in 2007 on a referral from Cruz's psychiatrist with Lynda Cruz telling him her adopted son suffered from anxiety and nervousness and had trouble controlling his temper. But she also said he was friendly and got along fine with his peers — claims that a neighbor, preschool teachers and an elementary school special education counselor have testified were not true.

Kravitz said that while he suggested weekly sessions for Cruz, his mother only brought him 15 times over a 13-month span, a decade before he murdered 17 people at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018.

He said that was a major issue — Lynda Cruz would agree that her son needed more consistent treatment and she needed to be more consistent in her discipline of him and his younger half-brother, Zachary, but did not follow through. She was 57, depressed from her husband's sudden 2003 death and dealing with two “tumultuous” young children, he said.

They would yell, throw tantrums and break furnishings, he said.

“They raised it to an art form," Kravitz said. “Nikolas was easily set off and Zachary seemed to derive some pleasure from pushing Nikolas’ buttons.”

That would set off their mother, something both boys seemed to enjoy.

“She lost her cool frequently and backed down to the boys frequently, which only made the problems worse," he said. He said he tried to work with her, but she felt embarrassed by her sons' behavior and felt people were judging her.

Cruz's attorneys are in Day 3 of their defense, hoping to persuade his jury to sentence him to life without parole instead of death. Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of first-degree murder and the trial, which began July 18, is only to determine his sentence.

The defense is trying to overcome the prosecution’s case, which featured surveillance video of Cruz, then 19, mowing down students and staff with an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle as he stalked a three-story building for seven minutes, photos of the aftermath and a jury visit to the building.

For Cruz to receive a death sentence, the jury must be unanimous. If one juror votes for life, that will be his sentence.

The defense has focused on the mental and emotional problems Cruz exhibited from his earliest days. Testimony has shown that his birth mother was a street prostitute who abused cocaine and alcohol and as a toddler he was developmentally delayed, often violent towards other children and teased and bullied for his small stature, unusual appearance and odd behavior. When he was 8, he acted like a 6-year-old, at best, Kravitz said.

“He stood out like a sore thumb," he said.

Steven Schusler, who lived across the street from the Cruzes from 2009 to 2015, said that when Nikolas Cruz was 10, his landlord called Cruz “the weird one” to his face, causing the boy “to curl up” like a salted snail. He once saw Cruz running around the house with an air gun, his limbs flailing wildly — a move he demonstrated for the jury.

Kravitz said Cruz had a fear of abandonment because of his father's death and his adoption and had an active “bad imagination.”

“He was extremely fearful his mother would forget to pick him up (at school) and he would be stuck there,” Kravitz said, even though that never happened.

He said Cruz had some signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder — for example, he always had to have exactly eight chicken nuggets.

He said he asked Cruz what his three wishes would be.

“Pokemon, a dog and more Pokemon,” Kravitz said.

Lynda Cruz died in November 2017, about four months before the shooting.

Under cross-examination, Kravitz conceded that Cruz's mother did get him further psychiatric and psychological treatment and might have been reluctant to keep her son's appointments with him because of the $87 per visit copay her insurance required.

Prosecutor Jeff Marcus asked Kravitz is there was anything about Cruz when he was 8 that would have indicated he would eventually commit mass murder. He said no.

“I've worked with some other very damaged kids and certainly to the best of my knowledge none of them have ever acted out like this,” Kravitz said.

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Closing arguments next in trial of 2 men in Whitmer plot

Jurors will hear closing arguments Monday in the retrial of two men charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.

Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. declined to testify Friday as defense lawyers rested their case in federal court in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The government has portrayed Fox and Croft as leaders of a wild plan to snatch Whitmer at her vacation home in Elk Rapids, Michigan, and trigger chaos across the U.S.

Fox, Croft and their allies were furious about COVID-19 restrictions and generally disgusted by government, prosecutors say.

Defense lawyers, however, say Fox and Croft were a bumbling, foul-mouthed, marijuana-smoking pair exercising free speech and incapable of leading anything as extraordinary as an abduction of a public official. They say FBI agents and informants fed their outrage and pulled them into their web.

“It has FBI fingerprints all over it,” Christopher Gibbons said.

The jury heard secretly recorded conversations and read violent social media posts, some written before the FBI got involved. Two undercover agents and an informant testified for hours, explaining how the men trained in Wisconsin and Michigan and visited Elk Rapids to see Whitmer's home.

Other witnesses included Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, who pleaded guilty and insisted the group was not entrapped.

Fox and Croft are on trial for a second time after a jury in April couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict but acquitted two other men.

Croft, 46, is from Bear, Delaware. Fox, 39, was living in the basement of a vacuum shop in the Grand Rapids area.

Whitmer, a Democrat, has blamed then-President Donald Trump for stoking mistrust and fomenting anger over coronavirus restrictions and refusing to condemn hate groups and right-wing extremists like those charged in the plot.

She said Sunday that she hasn't been following the retrial, but that she remains concerned about “violent rhetoric in this country.”

"This is a dangerous trend that is happening. We cannot let it become normalized and I do hope that anyone that’s out there plotting to hurt their fellow Americans is held accountable,” Whitmer said at the Michigan Democratic Party's convention in Lansing.

Trump recently called the kidnapping plan a “fake deal.”

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Find the AP’s full coverage of the kidnapping plot trial: https://apnews.com/hub/whitmer-kidnap-plot-trial

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Source https://www.globalcourant.com/closing-arguments-next-in-trial-of-2-men-in-whitmer-plot/?feed_id=14124&_unique_id=63032919ea570

Texas trial begins for man accused of killing his daughters

DALLAS -- A man who evaded arrest for more than 12 years after being accused of fatally shooting his two teenage daughters in a taxi parked near a Dallas-area hotel was “obsessed with possession and control,” a prosecutor said Tuesday during opening statements of his capital murder trial.

“He controlled what they did, who they talked to, who they could be friends with, if they and who they could date," prosecutor Lauren Black said. "And he controlled everything in his household."

Yaser Said, 65, is accused of killing 18-year-old Amina Said and 17-year-old Sarah Said on New Year’s Day in 2008. Said, who entered a not guilty plea Tuesday, faces an automatic life sentence if convicted.

About a week before the sisters were killed, they and their mother fled their home in the Dallas suburb of Lewisville to Oklahoma to get away from Yaser Said, who worked as a taxi driver, Black said. The sisters had become “very scared for their lives,” and the decision to leave was made after Said “put a gun to Amina's head and threatened to kill her,” the prosecutor said.

But, Black said, in another act of “control” and “manipulation” by Said, he told them he had changed and convinced them to return home. The evening the sisters were shot, their father wanted to take just the two of them to a restaurant, she said.

In a letter written to the judge overseeing the case, Said said he was not happy with his kids’ “dating activity” but denied killing his daughters. Defense attorney Joseph Patton said in opening statements that the evidence would not support a conviction, that police were too quick to focus on Said and suggested that anti-Muslim sentiment played into that focus. Said was born in Egypt.

Before the sisters were found shot to death in a taxi parked near a hotel in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Sarah Said had managed to call 911 using a cellphone, telling the operator that her father shot her and that she was dying.

Black said Sarah Said was shot nine times and Amina Said was shot twice.

In moments of extreme trauma, like being shot multiple times, people can have hallucinations, Patton said.

In an email to her Lewisville High School history teacher a few days before she and her sister were killed, Amina Said said that she and Sarah did not want to live by their father’s culture and marry men from the Middle East, “especially men we don’t know or love.” So they were running away from their father's home, she said in the email prosecutors read into evidence.

“I know that he will search until he finds us, and he will without any drama nor doubt kill us,” the email read.

After the sisters were found fatally shot in the taxi, police contacted the taxi's registered owner, who said Yaser Said had been driving the taxi for the past 10 days, according to an affidavit for an arrest warrant.

Said, who had been sought on a capital murder warrant since the slayings, was placed on the FBI's most-wanted list. He was finally arrested in August 2020 in Justin, about 35 miles (60 kilometers) northwest of Dallas. His son, Islam Said, and his brother, Yassim Said, were subsequently convicted of helping him evade arrest.

Black said the sisters, both high school students in Lewisville, dreamed of becoming doctors, and that Yaser Said grew “angrier” as they grew up and became more educated and independent.

“When they had more independence, that was less control for him,” Black said.

Source https://www.globalcourant.com/texas-trial-begins-for-man-accused-of-killing-his-daughters/?feed_id=5825&_unique_id=62e9c8fb4c2f3