Nikolas Cruz fans send sexual pics, adoring letters to confessed killer

John Bacon | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Accused Parkland gunman Nikolas Cruz is getting tons of fan mail Parkland, Florida gunman Nikolas Cruz has been getting showered with tons of fan mail that include sexually explicit pictures and donations.

Nikolas Cruz, the teen accused of killing 17 people in a shooting rampage at a Florida high school last month, is attracting an avalanche of mail from fans offering friendship, encouragement and sexually provocative photos.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained hundreds of pages of photocopies of letters and photos sent to Cruz, 19, who is being held while awaiting trial on a litany of charges including 17 counts of first degree murder.

“No one else is dealing w/your demons, meaning maybe defeating them could be the beginning of your meaning, friend," an 18-year-old from New York wrote in a letter decorated with pink hearts. "I know you could use a good friend right now. Hang in there and keep your head up."

A woman from Chicago sent Cruz nine photos, including a photo in a bikini, one of her cleavage and another of her posterior. A Texas woman commented on his "beautiful" eyes and "handsome" freckles.

Cruz is on suicide watch and is not permitted to receive mail, most of which is opened by jail officials. Broward County Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, whose office is representing Cruz, told the Sun Sentinel he has never seen so much mail for a defendant in his 40 years as a public defender.

“We read a few religious ones to him that extended wishes for his soul and to come to God,” Finkelstein said, “We have not and will not read him the fan letters or share the photos of scantily clad teenage girls.”

More: Prosecutor seeks death penalty for Florida shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz

More: Nikolas Cruz's brother arrested at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High

Steven Dubovsky, the University at Buffalo chair of Psychiatry who has studied mass shootings, says some people get a kind of "notoriety and fame by association" with heinous killers.

"Anybody with real relationships or any firm grasp on reality is not going to engage in this behavior," Dubovsky said. "You have people who have no real gratification in life."

Cruz is not the first mass murderer to draw a rabid fan following. Charles Manson, who died in prison in November, was briefly engaged in 2014 to a woman who ran the website Release Charles Manson Now.

"It’s like hanging out with a rock star or being a groupie," Dubovsky said. "There are a lot of groupies around. So they are murder groupies instead of a rock star groupies."

Finkelstein said he worries that young people are looking up to Cruz: “That scares me. It's perverted.”

Cruz, 19, walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland on Valentine's Day, armed with a semiautomatic rifle. He walked out about six minutes later amid chaos as students fled to safety or hunkered down in classrooms.

In addition to the death toll, more than a dozen students and staff were wounded in the carnage.

After stopping at a Walmart and a McDonald's, Cruz was apprehended by a police officer about an hour after the rampage, walking in a neighborhood not far from the school.

The tragedy energized student leaders at the school to demand safer schools and tighter restrictions on guns. They organized a student walkout at schools nationwide, then a March for Our Lives that drew more than a million people to rallies and marches across the nation and around the world.

Meanwhile, Zachary Cruz, the 18-year-old brother of Nikolas Cruz, pleaded no contest Thursday to a misdemeanor charge of trespassing on the Stoneman Douglas campus March 19. He was sentenced to time served and six months of probation.