Parkland shooting suspect is getting $430,000 from life insurance and may lose his lawyers

When Cruz received public defense services last year, his lawyers wrote in court filings that he was a possible beneficiary in the estates of his parents, Lynda and Roger Cruz. But on Wednesday, his lawyers said that neither they nor Cruz, 20, had expected the payout to be so large.

“It has come to the attention of undersigned counsel that Nikolas Cruz is a beneficiary in a MetLife life insurance policy and is entitled to half of a death benefit valued at $864,929.17 as of April 23, 2019,” the public defender’s office wrote. “The defendant and undersigned counsel were previously unaware of this entitlement.”

The court filing did not say which of Cruz’s parents had bought the life insurance policy, which will pay him more than $430,000. It also did not say who was splitting the money with Cruz, but he was one of two children adopted by his parents. The other was his brother, Zachary.

Cruz was charged last year in the Feb. 14, 2018, rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which left 14 students and three staff members dead. Seventeen more were injured in the shooting, which scarred an upscale Miami suburb and sparked a nationwide push for gun control that has achieved mixed results.

His public defense team said last year that he would plead guilty in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of parole, but prosecutors said last March that they planned to seek the death penalty in the case.

Cruz stood silently last year when he was indicted on 17 counts of premeditated murder in the first degree and 17 counts of attempted murder in the first degree. Standing silently in Florida effectively amounts to a not guilty plea.

Court documents filed by the public defender’s office last April estimated Cruz’s net worth to be $28,000. That included $1,000 in cash and $2,200 in Microsoft stock, along with what looks in retrospect like a modest future windfall: “an entitlement to a $25,000 life insurance policy from a deceased parent.”

The public defender’s office argued at the time that, despite that nest egg, Cruz should be considered effectively indigent because he could not access most of that money until the life insurance policy was paid out. That gave him access to public defense services even though he was not technically impoverished.

“Defendant may at some point become a potential beneficiary to the estate of his deceased mother, although the administration of the estate is still pending,” the public defender wrote at the time. “Whether or not defendant will ultimately receive any monies from his mother’s estate is unknown.”

The public defender’s office was assigned to Cruz’s case in February 2018, days after the massacre at the high school. It acknowledged then, too, that Cruz “may be a beneficiary in probate matters” related to two separate estates.

One, for his adoptive father, Roger Cruz, had been pending since at least December 2016, when a lawyer for Cruz’s mother, Lynda, asked the court to “reopen and continue the administration of an estate wherein Nikolas Cruz may be a beneficiary.” The Miami Herald reported in September that Roger Cruz died when Nikolas Cruz was 5.

The second estate belonged to Lynda Cruz, who died three months before the shooting. Court documents show that a petition to begin administration of her estate was filed Feb. 15, 2018. The next day, prosecutors said, her son opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.