Nikolas Cruz’s Lifetime of Trouble: Family Loss, Flashes of Rage<br />Mr. Lewis said Mr. Cruz had said something to the effect of: “I don’t go to school on Valentine’s Day.”<br />Howard Finkelstein, the chief public defender in Broward County, said in an interview<br />that Mr. Cruz’s legal team had not yet decided whether to mount an insanity defense.<br />But Michael Goldfarb, whose 17-year-old son Bradley knew Mr. Cruz, said his son had told him Mr. Cruz was expelled for having a knife at school.<br />Helen Pasciolla said Lynda Cruz had called sheriff’s deputies to the house numerous times in an effort to keep Mr. Cruz in line.<br />The family of another schoolmate, the Snead family, took in Mr. Cruz because his friend felt badly<br />that Mr. Cruz was now alone in the world, said Jim Lewis, a lawyer for the family.<br />One time, I sent him home because he was misbehaving at our house and he took a golf club and smashed one of my trailers.”<br />He said that Mr. Cruz at one point had gone to a school for students with special needs.<br />Mr. Cruz and his brother, Zachary, had been adopted,<br />and were raised largely by their mother, Lynda Cruz, especially after their father, Roger P. Cruz, died suddenly in 2004 at the age of 67.
