Nikolas Cruz’s jailhouse calls reveal he LAUGHED about leaving MAGA hat on adopted mother’s grave

Nikolas Cruz laughed about leaving a MAGA hat on his adoptive-mother’s grave, according to a summary of a jailhouse conversation released ahead of his sentencing trial in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gunman, who killed 14 students and three staff members in 2018, told his brother’s roommate Richard Moore during a video visit in jail that he missed Lynda Cruz, 68, who died of pneumonia in November 2017, but got a sick chuckle out of the souvenir he left at her grave.

Nikolas Cruz said that he misses his ‘step mother and laughs at the fact that he left his Donald Trump ‘MAGA’ hat on her grave,’ according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by Local10 News.

The gunman knew his adoptive mother was a ‘liberal anti-type gun type,’ the Miami Herald previously reported, and he placed the hat in her casket to spite her.

‘Due to the fact that his mother hated Donald Trump he put it in her casket with her when she died and took a picture of her with the hat,’ the friend, Hunter McCutcheon, told a detective, the paper reported.

He later asked Patricia Devaney-Westerlind, a neighbor of the Cruzes who repeatedly had video visits with the gunman this year, to go to the grave and retrieve the hat.

Cruz told her to ‘remove the MAGA hat he left since he knew his mother would [not] like it [in] there,’ according to summaries of conversations he had with the neighbor.

Jurors were shown shirtless photos of Cruz sporting a MAGA hat with a handgun that he raised and fired for target practice. It’s not clear if that is the same hat the he put at the grave.

Nikolas Cruz pleaded guilty in October 2022 of the mass murders and is now on trial to determine what his punishment will be. The seven-man, five-woman jury will decide whether he is sentenced to death or life without parole. They must be unanimous to impose a death sentence.

Lynda Cruz was afraid of her son, another neighbor Paul Gold testified, but still took him to the Gun World of South Florida so that he could get an AK-47 rifle when he turned 18.

‘She told me she was scared of him,’ Gold said. ‘She told me not to believe the nice appearance he had and angelic ways and that he would turn and do bad things. And she was a little afraid of him at some times.’

 Aside from his posthumous prank with the MAGA hat, jurors were shown photos of damaged walls, punched by Nikolas and his brother Zachary Cruz, according to the Independent.

There was a cracked mirror and a damaged bathroom wall.

Gold told the jurors that Cruz would have ‘episodes,’ according to the news publication, saying it was ‘almost like it was another person who had done it.’

‘He would be very nice and pleasant to people and wanting to be nice to people and then another moment he would lose his temper and break things and seem out of his mind,’ he said.

‘Then when he calmed down you could see that he really was apologetic, almost like it was another person who had done it.’

It wasn’t just neighbors who saw the warning signs before the mass slaughter at the Parkland, Florida high school.

During his middle school years, Nikolas Cruz frequently cursed at teachers and made threats, and his drawings of gunshot victims were so disturbing that one teacher kept them for years, turning them over to authorities immediately after the massacred.

During cross-examination of a former special education counselor who worked with Cruz from sixth through eighth grade, prosecutor Jeff Marcus showed Jessica Clark Flournoy page after page of incident reports filed by Westglades Middle School teachers.

Cruz called girls and female teachers derogatory names, interrupted lessons and dashed from classrooms, according to the reports, which noted that teachers repeatedly called campus security about his behavior.

Under questioning from Cruz attorney Tamara Curtis, Flournoy said she was never made aware of the teachers´ reports.

‘It would have been helpful,’ she said.

But Marcus also showed Flournoy notes from one of her own meetings with Cruz during which he told her that if ‘the ship was going down,’ he ‘wanted to be known for something.’

‘I guess he is now, right?’ Marcus asked, drawing a quick objection from Cruz´s attorneys that Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer upheld.

His public defenders are in their second week of presenting testimony about Cruz´s troubled life – from his birth to a crack-addicted, hard-drinking prostitute who put him up for adoption to a childhood fraught with emotional and psychological problems that witnesses said were never adequately addressed.

Their defense strategy is aimed at counteracting the emotional, gruesome and graphic evidence and testimony the prosecution presented over three weeks as it laid out the killings and how Cruz planned the attack.

Flournoy testified that when she initially met with Cruz in sixth grade, he tried hard to get good grades, behave and make friends but he struggled. 

Cruz, who was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, had trouble focusing and staying organized, she said.

Flournoy said Cruz was extremely anxious – something elementary teachers also said in earlier testimony – and feared other students would discover he was doing poorly. She said when teachers returned homework and tests, he would quickly stuff the papers into his backpack without looking so no one else would see. 

He was embarrassed to raise his hand to get help, so Flournoy and his teachers devised a system where he would place a blue note card on his desk when he needed assistance.

She said by eighth grade, she knew his conduct had deteriorated: He was escorted by staff to class and accompanied by them at lunch, and at one point destroyed a bathroom sink.

But Flourney said she did not know the full extent of Cruz’s conduct until Marcus brought out the incident reports. 

And she said she did not remember ever being told that one Westglades teacher feared Cruz so much that she would not have him in her classroom unless an assistant principal or behavior specialist was present. 

Flournoy also said she never knew about the drawings of gunshot victims that a teacher kept.

Marcus then asked her to read aloud some entries from the reports. 

They included:

Instead of completing a vocabulary assignment, Cruz drew stick figures with genitalia and of people shooting each other on the worksheet.

During lessons about the Civil War, Cruz became overly excited by President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, asking did the gunshots go ‘pop, pop, pop really fast and was there blood everywhere?’ When discussing soldiers killed during the war, he asked, ‘Did they eat them?’

One teacher reported that ‘Nikolas will find any excuse to bring up shooting guns or violence.’ When a student in that class wrote that Jesus was his hero, Cruz yelled out an obscenity. When told he would need to have security escort him to the bathroom, he replied that he hated the guards ‘and I hope they die,’ then swore.

During a discussion about a book, he told the class he disliked it but ‘I like guns. Can we talk about that?’ He then disrupted the class by tossing paper balls, cursing and throwing a pen cap and a pencil sharpener at other students.

In one class, he stood up and flashed his middle finger at another student. When the teacher picked up the phone to call security, he rushed over and grabbed it. When the teacher told a student to go to another class and ask the teacher to call security, Cruz banged the receiver against the phone several times and then bolted from the room.

During class, Cruz claimed he was bored and began blowing a party horn. When the teacher asked him to hand it over, he broke it.

Cruz was eventually sent to a school for students with emotional and behavioral problems before he was allowed to attend Stoneman Douglas. He was expelled from the high school a year before the shooting. He was never committed to a mental hospital.

The trial resumes Wednesday afternoon and is expected to last into October.