PARKLAND, Fla. — Hours after 17 students and staff were gunned down on Valentine's Day, alleged shooter Nikolas Cruz claimed he heard demons and said "kill me. Just (expletive) kill me. (expletive)" as waited for a detective to interview him, a newly released transcript shows.
- Officials: Nikolas Cruz confessed to Parkland shootings
- State Attorney releases transcript of interview with detectives
- In interview, Cruz claims he has been hearing voices for years
- READ IT: Full interview transcript with Nikolas Cruz
The 217-page document appears to show dark thoughts, transcribed from a recording of Cruz's first interview with detectives. The interview transcript was released Monday by the State Attorney's Office in Broward County.
The transcript appears to show Cruz, accused in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, to be a troubled and lonely person.
At one point during the interview, Cruz tells Broward Sheriff's Det. John Curcio that he had been hearing one voice for years that he refers to as "the demon."
Cruz also says that the voices began when he was a child, after his father died. He claims they intensified after his mother's death in November.
Det. John Curcio: "You're talking about demons. What are the demons?"
Nikolas Cruz: "It's one. It's another voice. The evil side."
Curcio: "OK. How long has that voice been going on?"
Cruz: "Years."
Cruz claimed the demon told him to "Burn. Kill. Destroy." He claimed that before the shooting at some point he did set fire in a fire pit and that he had killed wild birds, the report stated.
When asked how he was about to kill wild birds, Cruz simply said that he waited for the birds to come up to him, at which point Curcio said that was hard to do since most wild birds would not allow a person to get that close to them.
When Curcio asked him if he used a pellet gun to kill the wild birds, Cruz said he did, but Curcio asked where the pellet gun was and Cruz stated that it broke, the report stated.
During the interrogation, Cruz said that the voice he heard in his head belonged to a young adult and that he liked listening to it because the alternative would be he had no one to talk to and he did not like the loneliness, the report continued.
At one point, Curcio said he did not believe there was a voice, however Cruz insisted that there was and it told Cruz to kill himself.
The 19-year-old man was in the interrogation room for 11 hours, and cameras rolled from start to finish.
At one point, Cruz discusses his plans to commit a different mass shooting before the Feb. 14 attack, according to the document. Cruz says two to three weeks before the Parkland shooting, he walked onto the Stoneman Douglas campus with an AR-15 in a duffel bag, planning to shoot people at a park, the report says.
Cruz says he did not go through with it but couldn't explain why. Later he refers to himself as a "coward."
During the interrogation, he confesses to the Parkland mass shooting, the report states.
The report also states that Cruz told Curcio that he tried to kill himself twice before the shootings.
Documents also show Cruz was left alone for some time after the interrogation and allowed to meet his brother before being sent to jail the morning of Feb. 15.