A California man who is on the autism spectrum has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for cyberstalking families of MSD school shooting victims in Parkland, Florida. 22-year-old Brandon Fleury of Santa Ana was convicted of three counts of cyberstalking and one count of transmitting a kidnapping threat while impersonating the actual shooting defendant Nikolaus Cruz and serial killer Ted Bundy. U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz imposed the 66-month sentence on 22-year-old Brandon Fleury of Santa Ana, California, rejecting a request by prosecutors for the maximum 20-year sentence. Trial evidence showed that between December 2018 and January 2019, Fleury used several Instagram accounts to threaten and harass families of victims of the Valentine’s Day 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which left 17 dead and 17 wounded. In some messages, he claimed kinship with and even impersonated shooting defendant Nikolas Cruz. In others, he invoked the names of infamous serial killers such as Ted Bundy. “I killed your loved ones hahaha,” one message said. “Did you like my Valentines gift? I killed your friends,” said another. One of his user names was “nikolas.cruz.killed.your.sister,” court records show. One message from that account said this:“Hahaha she had her whole life ahead of her and I STOLE IT FROM HER,” according to court documents. “The victims lived in constant fear that the individual bombarding them” with the messages would follow in Cruz’s footsteps, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ajay Alexander said in court papers. “The victims deserve justice. They deserve to live in peace and with the belief that they are safe and secure.” On Fleury’s electronic devices, authorities also found thousands of saved images of Bundy, images of the targeted victims and screenshots of the messages that he had sent the victims.
Brandon Michael Fleury, the 22-year-old California man who sent hundreds of obscene and threatening messages to grieving parents and survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison.https://t.co/k0eMy5EjGo
— Mario Ariza (@inaminorkey) March 2, 2020
Meanwhile, Cruz faces the death penalty if convicted of the 17 killings in the Parkland shooting.