Florida school shooting calls released

TALLAHASSEE (AP) — In a newly released recording from the day of a deadly Florida school shooting, the parents of a 17-year-old girl tell a 911 dispatcher their daughter is texting from a classroom where the door’s glass was shot out.

Later, the student texts that police have arrived. After getting the rest of the message, the mother raises her voice, “Three shot in her room. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

As a gun-control bill sits on the governor’s desk, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office released 12 minutes of radio transmissions from its deputies and a neighboring police agency highlighting the chaos during the Feb. 14 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

That material also included 10 of the 81 recordings of frantic calls by students and parents to a 911 center.

The excerpts showed a deputy on school grounds first thought the loud bangs were firecrackers, then realized they were gunshots — yet he never ran toward them.

Other responding deputies and officers desperately tried to sort through a chaotic scene, treat the injured, lock down the school and locate the shooter.

Three weeks after the Parkland high school shooting, Florida Gov. Rick Scott has a gun-control bill on his desk that challenges the National Rifle Association (NRA) but falls short of what the Republican and survivors of the massacre demanded.

Now he must decide whether to sign it. Scott has not said what he will do, and he plans to take up the issue on Monday with relatives of 17 people slain in the attack.

“I’m going to take the time and I’m going to read the bill and I’m going to talk to families,” he said.

In the shooting’s aftermath, Scott broke with the NRA. He had received top marks from the lobbying group in the past for supporting gun-rights measures, and his new stance reinvigorated the gun-control movement.

The governor, who is expected to seek a US Senate seat later this year, has called for raising the minimum age to purchase any type of gun, but he does not support arming teachers.

Instead, he wanted lawmakers to adopt his own $500-million proposal to put at least one law enforcement officer in every school.

AP Students hold their hands in the air as they are evacuated by police from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida after a shooter opened fire on the campus in a photo taken on Feb. 14.