Parkland school shooting victim describes classmate taking final breaths
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — In heartbreaking detail, a witness to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre described Tuesday watching as his mortally wounded classmate took his final breaths.
Alex Dworet testified at killer Nikolas Cruz’s sentencing trial that he initially thought the loud booms erupting outside his classroom were coming from the school band — until he felt a burning sensation on the back of his head and realized he had been grazed by gunfire.
“I remember feeling trickling down the back of my head and onto my chest,” he told the jurors. “It was all bloody. That’s when I realized something’s wrong. But I didn’t want to believe it was a shooting.”
After getting on the floor with his classmates, Dworet said, he scanned the room while trying to remain calm.
“I looked straight ahead of me and I saw Alex Schachter passed away,” he told the court. “There was a metal bar on his desk and half his body was off the bar and the other half was kind of in his seat. I saw a pile of blood forming under him.”
With many in the court gallery weeping, Dworet recalled seeing the 14-year-old band trombone player’s final moments.
“I saw his body,” he said. “Not spasming, but trying to take his final breaths. At that moment it started getting more real.”
Schachter was one of 14 students killed in the February 14, 2018, mayhem in Parkland.
Dworet was struck in the back of his head by a bullet, but recovered from his injury. He told the court that he eventually attended a technical school and now works for Audi.
While Dworet survived, his brother, Nicholas, 17, was shot and killed in a nearby classroom.
Earlier Tuesday, former Marjory Stoneman student Chris McKenna told jurors of a chilling encounter he had with Cruz in the moments before the slaughter began.
McKenna testified that he was walking down a hallway en route to the bathroom during class when he came face to face with Cruz and his AR-15 rifle.
“He said, ‘Get out of here, things are about to get bad,'” McKenna recalled.
The horrified student sprinted out of the building and ran into staffer Aaron Feis, a coach and teacher at the school who was later shot and killed during the carnage.
With the first shots now audible, Feis drove McKenna to another part of campus on a golf cart before the student ran to a nearby friend’s house to call his mother.
Cruz in October pleaded guilty to killing 17 people at his former school.
Jurors are deciding if he will be given life without parole or the death penalty.
Cruz’s attorneys will argue that his traumatic upbringing serves as a mitigating factor in the case, while prosecutors assert that the heinous crime calls for his execution.
The trial is expected to last several months.
