October 13, 2022

Statement from Broward State Attorney Harold F. Pryor  and the Broward State Attorney’s Office:

“The dreadful, horrific crimes perpetrated by this school mass shooter in Parkland on Valentine’s Day of 2018 have changed our community and will continue to impact all of us forever more. The parents and families of the schoolchildren and the staff members who were massacred lost so much and our hearts are with them. We hope they know that all of us lost 17 wonderful people that day and that our world is a poorer and sadder place without them. To the survivors, please know that you are not forgotten in this and that we respect and salute your courage in all that you have endured.

When I was elected and sworn in as Broward State Attorney, I promised that I would uphold the law and I agreed that this community – not one person sitting in an office – should hear all of the facts and all of the evidence and that this community should make the decision about whether this mass killer should get the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

We thank the jurors for their service and for taking on this difficult task. We thank the law enforcement officers who went into the school. We thank the law enforcement officers who arrested the killer and investigated the crimes.

We thank our prosecutors and we thank the whole team from our office who worked on this case with the passion and dedication for truth and for justice that is the hallmark of our team. We thank the courthouse staff. We thank the witnesses. We thank the victims’ families and the survivors for everything.

I thank everyone who worked to ensure that the whole truth – the full story – was told about this tragedy with full transparency. To my knowledge, this is the first time that the full story of a community’s loss and all of the relevant facts have been told about a mass shooting of this magnitude. We have not shied away from telling all of the horror, all of the loss, all of the devastation, all of the pain, all of the facts, all of the truth. We hope that, while there is no such thing as closure, this will bring some measure of finality and justice to this terrible chapter.”