Police release interrogation video of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz smacking himself and asking for death

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A new video recording shows the alleged Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter telling police that he had “demons” in his head who talked to him, and then later hitting himself in the face as he waits in an interrogation room.

The release of the footage, made public on Wednesday, followed a Florida judge ordering the release of a redacted transcript from the video earlier in the week, in response to a lawsuit filed by news organisations to obtain it under the state's freedom of information laws.

“I hear demons,” the alleged shooter, a 19-year-old former student at the Parkland, Florida, school he is alleged to have attacked, says in the video. “A voice, [a] demon voice”.

The officer asks the suspect to elaborate at one point, and the alleged shooter then says that he hears the voice about once a day, and usually in the afternoon.

A separate clip shows the suspect making his finger into the shape of a gun, and fake shooting it into his temple. He later punches himself in the head.

“Kill me,” he said in the video, then begins to cry. “Just f****** kill me”.

Ryan Petty, the father of one of the 17 victims of the Valentine’s Day shooting, said that the video was tough to watch, but that it was important that society understood what brought the young man to turn the barrel on his former classmates and educators.

“It’s painful,” Mr Petty told the WPLG news channel after the video’s release. “I mean, it’s clear to me we’ve got a sick individual that I think at the time was coming to grips with what he had just done. I don’t like to think about that day, to be honest. But if we’re going to figure out how to stop this, we’ve got to try to understand it”.

The video, at one point, includes a segment where the alleged shooter — 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz — is visited by his younger brother, Zachary.

“People think you’re a monster now,” the brother said.

“A monster?” Mr Cruz asked.

“You don’t have anything and you’re not acting like yourself,” the brother, 18, said. “Like, why? … This is not who you are … Why did you do this?”

In response to the question, Mr Cruz chuckled slightly.

“Don’t even laugh at me,” his brother responded.

“I’m sorry, dude,” Mr Cruz said.

“I told you when we were walking down the hallway that it’s just me and you, and I had your back,” the brother said. “You probably felt like you had nobody but I, I care about you. I literally would pull my heart out for you”.

After his arrest, Mr Cruz’s lawyers offered to plead guilty if their client would avoid the death penalty, but prosecutors declined, preferring to pursue the death penalty for the alleged murderer.