Parkland guard a perv
Accosted 2 Stoneman girls, including vic, months before massacre
An unarmed security monitor accused of doing too little when a gunman opened fire in the halls of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was nearly fired for sexually harassing two female students — one of them a victim in the deadly Parkland massacre.
Sexual harassment allegations raised against 39-yearold Andrew Medina were reviewed by the school district's Professional Standards Committee, which concluded there was probable cause to charge him with inappropriate conduct, according to records obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel. On Oct. 4, they recommended his dismissal. But he wasn't fired. “Discipline should not be termination, but instead a three-day suspension,” reads a handwritten note at the bottom of the investigative report. Craig Nichols, chief of human resources for the district, signed off on the request and Medina was allowed to keep his job.
According to records obtained by the newspaper, Medina, who has also worked as the school's JV basebell coach since 2010, asked out one female student and made lewd comments to another.
Hunter Pollack, 20, confirmed that his sister, Meadow Pollack, was one of the students harassed by the security monitor. She was among the 17 people killed when 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz loosed a barrage of bullets inside the Parkland school.
Pollack said he and his father didn't know about the incident until the after the shooting, noting that Medina would have been fired otherwise.
“I think it's politically incorrect that they didn't fire him because if they did, maybe they would have had someone competent to stop [Cruz] from getting onto campus,” Pollack told CBS 4 News.
Medina, who was not armed at the time, told investigators shortly after the attack that he didn't confront Cruz or lock down the school. Rather he radioed fellow monitor David Taylor, warning him about a suspicious kid heading in his direction. Medina did little else to warn about the incoming threat while Taylor hid in a closet.
Child Protective Services was not notified amid the harassment investigation nor was a police report completed “as this case is solely administrative,” the investigator wrote.
Andrew Pollack, Meadow's father, said it's “mindboggling and upsetting” that the district has opted to reassign the security monitor.
“No one in the county has been held accountable for what happened,” he told the Sun Sentinel. “Not one person has lost their job.”