On the fourth day of Cruz’s sentencing trial, Wilford testified that he had walked to a nearby McDonald’s after evacuating the chaotic scene at the school to wait for his mother to pick him up. Cruz sat with him at his table and asked if he could get a ride — which Wilford declined.
Immediately after the shooting, Cruz went to a Walmart and bought a drink at a Subway there before heading to a McDonald’s, where Wilford was sitting inside.
“He just sat down next to me,” Wilford, who was a freshman, said in his testimony. “I didn’t think much of it. I was panicked. I was just trying to get back home.”
As Wilford was leaving to meet his mother who had arrived, Cruz asked for a ride.
“He was pretty insistent on it, and I said no,” Wilford said. “I was just trying to get home, my sister wasn’t answering her phone, I was nervous, I was panicked. I also had a bad gut feeling about it.”
Prosecutors presented on Thursday more witnesses focused on Cruz’s actions following the shooting, including managers of both the Subway and McDonald’s. The police officer who arrested Cruz also testified.
Officers describe what they saw that day
Closing out the first week of the sentencing trial for Cruz, prosecutor Mike Satz called three law enforcement officers to the stand on Friday to testify about what and who they saw inside the school when they responded to the mass shooting.
Broward County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Richard Van Der Eems testified that when he arrived on the scene, he saw smoke and dust and a child dead on the ground.
He described checking and clearing out classrooms, and said he saw student Anthony Borges all the way at the end of the hallway trying to say something and that “he kept trying to raise his hand up so we could see that he was alive.”
Jurors were also shown images from Van Der Eems’ body camera, which shows bodies he identified as Cara Loughran and Meadow Pollack, two of the students who died that day.
Coral Springs Police Department detective David Alfins testified about how he saw a vest and a rifle on the third-floor landing near Jaime Guttenberg’s body.
“I checked her vital signs for breath and for pulse, I found none,” he said.
Guttenberg was 14 years old when she died. Fred Guttenberg, Jaime’s father, was sitting in the court gallery staring down during Alfins’ testimony about his daughter.
Alfins also spoke about how student Joaquin Oliver’s dead body was blocking the bathroom door and how he had to move his body to make sure no one was inside the bathroom. He also said he saw student Peter Wang, another victim who died, “slumped down on the ground.”
More images of these victims were shown to the jury before the court recessed for lunch.
Prosecutors have asked a panel of 12 jurors to sentence Cruz to death, while his defense attorneys have asked for life in prison without the possibility of parole.
CNN’s Sara Weisfeldt contributed to this report.
