Pulse, Parkland share parallels
Early police responses similar but reactions are not
When the shooting began inside a Broward County high school last month, Deputy Scot Peterson remained outside rather than pursuing the gunman. Peterson was forced to retire and labeled a “coward” by President Donald Trump.
In 2016, when a gunman started shooting inside the Pulse nightclub, Orlando Police Det. Adam Gruler remained outside after firing at the shooter from the parking lot. Gruler was hailed as courageous by Orlando Police Chief John Mina and was a local congresswoman’s guest to Trump’s State of the Union speech in January.
While there are many differences between the two mass shootings, experts say they are also similar in at least one significant way: Each had a uniformed officer on scene who did not enter a building as gunfire from an assault-style rifle could be heard.
But the responses by politicians and law enforcement leaders to how officers reacted during the first deadly minutes of both massacres
couldn’t be more different.
Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at University of Alabama who studies mass shootings, said there should have been more scrutiny over the actions in the first minutes of the Pulse shooting.
“If the problems with the response to Pulse were national headlines two years ago, I think officers around the country could have learned that valuable lesson, and it may have led to different responses and more lives being saved at Parkland and elsewhere,” he said.
In Parkland, a community 200 miles south of Orlando, the school resource officer waited outside the classroom building for at least four minutes as 17 students and teachers were shot and killed, according to Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, who criticized his deputy’s actions after he viewed video footage of the response.
A lawyer for Peterson defended his actions, saying the sheriff “jumped to a conclusion” and that Peterson followed his training to remain outside because he thought the gunfire was coming from outdoors.
At Pulse, Gruler was working extra duty as security outside the club when Omar Mateen walked inside and started shooting at 2:02 a.m. on June 12, 2016. Gruler, who from the parking lot spotted the barrel of a rifle inside the club, fired his weapon from two different spots. At least two more officers arrived within minutes, but police didn’t enter the club until 2:08 a.m., according to an Orlando Police timeline.
By then, OPD estimates the shooter had fired more than 200 rounds in less than five minutes. Forty-nine people were killed inside the gay night club and more than 50 others were injured.
Gruler declined to comment because investigations are still continuing into what happened that night.
Mina said comparing the response at Pulse with what happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month is unfair and inaccurate.
“In this instance, we’re talking about a club that’s smaller than a TGI Friday’s,” said Mina, who recently announced his candidacy for Orange County sheriff. “Adam [Gruler] did engage the suspect. He did go toward the sound of gunfire. Just because he took a different route doesn’t mean he didn’t go toward the sound of gunfire.”
In the wake of the Parkland shooting, more than 70 Republican members of the House have called for Israel, the Broward sheriff, to resign, and Gov. Rick Scott called for the FBI director to step down, but no state or local officials have criticized the police response at Pulse. The criticism of Israel, a Democrat, is centered on his deputy’s decision not to enter the school building and his department’s prior interactions with the shooter.
Congresswoman Val Demings, D-Orlando — who is a former Orlando Police chief — invited Gruler to the State of the Union earlier this year, and in a press release lauded “the courage he showed” at Pulse.
Demings’ office declined to comment on potential similarities between what happened at Pulse and Stoneman Douglas High School and said she wanted to hear all the facts before drawing a conclusion about Peterson’s actions.
Unlike in the aftermath of the massacre at Pulse, the Florida Legislature aggressively pursued changes to the state’s gun laws in the wake of the Parkland shooting.
The difference is not lost on Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, one of the only openly gay members of the House, who was elected in the months following the shooting at Pulse.
He noted that the Parkland shooting occurred as the Legislature was in session. Democratic lawmakers tried to force a special session to take up gun laws in the weeks after Pulse, but their demands were ignored by Republican leadership.
State Republicans’ strategy then “was to wait for the media spotlight to disappear … and it kind of worked,” Smith said.
There is another distinct difference: The Pulse shooting was immediately labeled a terrorist attack while the shooting at Stoneman Douglas is widely being blamed by Republicans on a failure of the mental health system and missed warning signs exhibited by the shooter.
Nearly two years after the Pulse shooting, some of what happened is still unknown. The FBI hasn’t released a ballistics report, which would detail where rounds landed and from whose firearms. Investigations into the shootings by Gruler and the officers who killed Mateen more than three hours later still haven’t concluded.
According to the Justice Department’s after-action report on the Pulse shooting, Gruler fired at the shooter twice from outside the club between 2:02 a.m. and 2:05 a.m.
The detective fired just after the sound of the first gunshots when he saw the barrel of a rifle just inside the club’s doors and again from outside the club’s patio along Orange Avenue, said Frank Straub, lead author from the Police Foundation, which was contracted by DOJ to write the report.
Gruler immediately recognized his handgun was “no match” for the rifle being fired inside the club and “moved to a position that afforded him more cover in the parking lot,” the report states. Straub said Gruler acted quickly. “He tried to engage the guy, he knows the shooter has a rifle, he knows the club, he has no tactical advantage to go inside the club,” Straub said. “The protocol is to engage the suspect … One could argue that Gruler engaged the suspect.”
When officers stopped hearing gunfire from inside, they took a few minutes to form teams of four and began entering the club at 2:08 a.m.
The report validated that decision.
“If he [Mateen] was shooting during those three minutes, that would’ve been different,” Straub said.
But law enforcement experts differ on what constitutes swiftenough action to save lives in those first critical moments of shooting.
“If you’re hearing gunfire, then we encourage the officer to go in and stop the killing,” said Pete Blair, executive director of Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training at Texas State University. “These events tend to end very quickly and a lot of people can be injured in a very short period of time.”
One mother who lost her son inside Pulse has questioned the police response since the beginning and wasn’t satisfied by the answers in the DOJ report.
“I get it … they’re out-gunned,” said Christine Leinonen, whose son Drew died on the dance floor. “You can’t blame them … who would want to go in with a rapid fire of bullets that will tear your body apart? But, nonetheless, that’s the job they picked.”