BROWARD COUNTY, Fla.

BROWARD COUNTY, Fla.

He kept his head down as he walked into the judicial complex, knowing his presence would attract stares. He emptied his pockets at security and hustled onto the elevator. He tugged at his tie, the one he’d borrowed because he forgot his suit. He hated suits. He hated all of this. But for his brother, he had come back again and again.
Out the elevator, down the hall, past the news reporters and up to the doors guarded by sheriff’s deputies. They stepped aside and he stepped into the courtroom.
There in a red jumpsuit was his brother, Nikolas Cruz, who had confessed to carrying out a massacre at his former high school.

Nikolas Cruz, 20, enters a courtroom at the Broward County Courthouse for a status hearing on Jan. 8, nearly a year after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School left 17 dead. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel/Pool/Associated Press)

Fourteen students and three staff members were killed that Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland. Seventeen others were injured, left with lasting scars, physical and mental. Hundreds more had their lives upended: parents suddenly without children, students rallying for gun control by day and dealing with panic attacks at night, first responders denounced for the choices they made amid the chaos.
Listen on Post Reports: “I’m stuck between loving him and hating him”
Some of those people were here in the courtroom, and sliding into a bench beside them now was another person whose life was derailed that day. Zachary Cruz was 17 when his older brother became one of the deadliest school shooters in American history.
In the months since, Zach had been ostracized by his community, involuntarily confined to a psychiatric facility, arrested twice, kicked out of his guardian’s home, taken in by strangers who moved him 900 miles north to Virginia, and blamed, not so much by others but by himself.

After his brother confessed to the Parkland shooting, Zachary Cruz, now 18, moved to Virginia. “I'm stuck between loving him and hating him because of what he did,” Zach says. (Julia Rendleman/For The Washington Post)

He craned his neck to get a better view of his brother. For this January hearing, Nik was wearing new glasses. Zach noticed his hair had been buzzed short again.
Zach kept trying to make eye contact. But Nik’s head was turned to the side, facing away from him.
“We would like to have a trial date to work towards,” a prosecutor was telling the judge. The state of Florida, renowned for imposing death sentences, was seeking one for 20-year-old Nik. “We’re coming up on the anniversary of this incident.”
Zach looked back down at his skateboarding shoes. He and Nik never knew their biological parents, and their adoptive parents were dead. Zach alone had joined the growing collective of people whose siblings or children became mass shooters. But unlike for the relatives of the Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook shooters, his brother, for now, was still alive.
That left Zach with a choice. To support Nik was to forever tie himself to the heinous crime his brother admitted to committing. To distance himself was to abandon the only real family he has left.
“I always carry it with me. Every day. There is no forgetting,” Zach says. “I’m stuck between loving him and hating him because of what he did.”
The prosecutor kept talking. The judge nodded along. And every few minutes, Zach looked up again, hoping his brother would acknowledge that he was still here.

'I love him because he's my brother'

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Zach spent the afternoon of Feb. 14, 2018, in the place he could almost always be found. He knew the curve of the skate park’s dips and lifts, the sound his board made as it grinded against metal, the sting of a wipeout that meant he’d almost landed his trick.
Skating had been Zach’s escape since the day his mom, Lynda Cruz, relented at a garage sale and bought him his first board. He brought it home to the five-bedroom house in Parkland where the boys were being raised and spray-painted it gold.
Lynda and Roger Cruz had adopted Nik first, when he was an infant. Seventeen months later, when they learned Nik’s biological mom had given birth again, they took in Zachary, too.
The brothers looked almost nothing alike. Nik was always pale, with light brown eyes and straight hair. Zach’s caramel skin and thick curls made him assume his father was black. Lynda would never say.
She did not tell the boys they were adopted until they were in middle school, long after Roger suffered a fatal heart attack in 2004. Zach was just 4 when he died, leaving their family without his income and steadying presence. Zach’s only memory of his dad was the way Roger would lift him up, set his little feet on top of his own and dance around the room.

A childhood photo of Zach, left, and his brother, whom he calls Nik.

Zach Cruz holds a photo of himself, at right, with his adoptive parents Lynda and Roger Cruz and brother Nik. Roger died of a heart attack in 2004, and Lynda died of pneumonia in 2017.

A childhood photo of Zach, left, and his brother, whom he calls Nik. Zach Cruz holds a photo of himself, at right, with his adoptive parents Lynda and Roger Cruz and brother Nik. Roger died of a heart attack in 2004, and Lynda died of pneumonia in 2017. (Photos by Julia Rendleman/For The Washington Post)

Theirs was a childhood filled with those small acts of love. When the boys were toddlers, Lynda took photos of them in the bathtub, Nik’s arms wrapped around Zach.
When they grew bigger, they would beg Lynda to take them to Liberty Park, where there was an elaborate wooden jungle gym and a fence engraved with the names of community members who donated to the park. The boys would run over and find their names, written side by side.
They learned responsibility by caring for their dogs, a cuddly retriever mix named Maisey and an energetic terrier named Kobe.
Then came the days of walking to the bus stop together, of long rounds of Halo on the Xbox, of moaning in unison when Lynda would yank its plug from the wall, saying they were wasting power.
They didn’t know just how sick she was when, in the fall of 2017, she visited a CVS clinic thinking she had the flu. The clinic called an ambulance and sent her to the hospital, where she died of pneumonia. Zach says he was the one who had to tell Nik she was gone.
The boys went to stay with their mom’s friend, Rocxanne Deschamps, who lived 40 minutes away, closer to the beach. Nik left within weeks to move in with one of his friends. Zach stayed, registering for an online school to continue his junior year. But most days he took off on his skateboard instead.
Then, on that February afternoon, Deschamps showed up at the skate park, hurtled out of her car and ran toward him.

People awaiting word from students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., gather south of the campus on the day of the shooting last February. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel/AP)

Kareen Vargas, 27, prays outside Stoneman Douglas. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Steve Zipper visits a makeshift memorial in Parkland. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

LEFT: People awaiting word from students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., gather south of the campus on the day of the shooting last February. (John McCall/South Florida Sun-Sentinel/Associated Press) MIDDLE: Kareen Vargas, 27, prays outside Stoneman Douglas. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) RIGHT: Steve Zipper visits a makeshift memorial in Parkland. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

“She was freaking out,” Zach remembers. “She kept saying, ‘Do you know what happened? Do you know what happened?’”
She thrust her phone into his hands. On the screen was a news article with a photo of Nik and a headline that said the words “school shooting.”
“At first, I thought it was a prank,” Zach said. But there were dozens more stories, all naming his brother as the suspected gunman.
Zach’s body carried him into the car, back to Deschamps’s trailer and down to the police station, while his mind was bombarded with the memories that told the whole story of his childhood:
When the brothers made it to the bus stop, Nik would slink across the street, not wanting to stand with the other kids. Zach didn’t join him.
Their games of Halo sometimes ended with Nik screaming uncontrollably, punching doors and stabbing seat cushions until their mom called the police.
She would call the police on Zach, too, when he stayed out late without permission. He’d come home to see Nik walking around the house with his shotgun, pretending to shoot invisible people while he blared “Pumped Up Kicks,” a song about a boy’s fantasy of becoming a school shooter.
Once Zach snooped in Nik’s phone and found messages that seemed to show his brother talking to himself. “I’m gonna go to that school,” Nik wrote. “I’m gonna shoot everybody.” Zach didn’t tell any one.

At the time it had all just seemed stupid — embarrassing, really, just Nik trying to get a reaction out of people.
But now a detective was across from Zach, asking if he had known what Nik was going to do. In a transcript of their conversation, released later by the state attorney’s office, the detective warns Zach that authorities are going to comb through Nik’s phone.
“Nothing on his phone is going to show that you knew he was gonna do this today?” the detective asked.
“No,” Zach answered. “I guarantee it.”
For nearly two hours, Zach stuttered and stammered, talking in circles, trying to explain.
“You have to understand him where, like, I realize, like, he’s not that bad,” Zach said. “I just — I don’t know. I feel bad because, like I feel like I haven’t, like, been like a real brother to him. I feel like I kind of let people make fun of him. Like I — people — I wouldn’t stick up for him.”
“Well, you know, hindsight’s always 20/20,” the detective said. “You can’t blame yourself for situations like this.”
“I mean,” Zach said. “I could have told somebody, like . . . when I found — when I saw this —”
He told the detective about the shotgun, the song, the texts.
“Is he going to get the death penalty?” Zach asked.
The detective wouldn’t say.
When they were finished, Zach had another question for him: “There’s nothing that I can do to get him out of this situation, right?”
“No,” the detective said. “Unfortunately not.”
But what he could do was talk to his brother. Right now. In another room, Nik had been under interrogation for hours, describing what he did, rambling about a demon who told him to “Burn. Kill. Destroy,” hitting himself in the head and whispering, “I just want to die now.”
Then he asked for an attorney, meaning a detective couldn’t keep asking questions until one was present. Instead he could bring in Zach, and watch to see what Nik said. A video camera in the room recorded it all, and the footage — edited by the state — was later released to the media.
“Okay Zach, have a seat,” the detective said, pointing to the plastic chair across from Nik. Zach sat and looked at his brother. Nik was wearing a pale blue hospital gown. His hands were cuffed behind his back. His left foot was chained to the floor.

Video released by police shows the first time Zach Cruz saw his brother after Parkland shooting