‘It was my job, and I didn’t find him,’ says deputy
Scot Peterson had spent much of the past three months in hiding, but now somebody was walking onto his porch and toward the front door. Peterson, 55, ducked away from the windows. His girlfriend, Lydia Rodriguez, walked to the entryway and began to pull down a corner of the white sheet that now covered most of their front door. “Oh please,” she said. “What now?”
It had been exactly 90 days since Peterson’s last shift as a school resource officer in Parkland, where he had been armed and on duty as 17 people were killed and 17 more were injured, and ever since, a procession had been making its way to
his door to demand accountability for another mass shooting. First came the Broward County Sheriff’s Office to repossess his police cruiser and his badge. Then came dozens of reporters and television trucks, jamming into the cul-de-sac of a retirement community to broadcast stories about the “Coward of Broward.” Then came a court officer serving Peterson with a lawsuit from a parent whose daughter had been killed on the school’s third floor. “Scot Peterson is a coward,” it read. “Scot Peterson did nothing. Scot Peterson waited and listened to the din of screams of teachers and students, many of who were dead and dying. He let innocent people die.”
“I’m not here,” Peterson said to Rodriguez.
“It’s OK,” she said, waving at two octogenarians holding a bag of cookies. “It’s the neighbors. Jim and Kelly.”
Peterson invited them inside and offered them seats in the living room. Christian music played over the speakers and Fox News Channel was muted on television. “Thank God for you two,” Peterson told them. They were two of the only people who had come over after the shooting just to ask if he was OK. As the crowds grew outside his house, they had let him sneak out his back door and through their yard whenever he left to see his lawyer, visit a psychologist, or go for a drive when he couldn’t sleep.
“How are you managing?” Kelly asked.
“I have some OK moments,” he said.
“We’ve been worried,” Jim said. “We’ve been watching the news.”
“Oh yeah? What are they saying?” Peterson asked, even though he had already heard what they were saying and couldn’t stop himself from hearing it, even now. “A disgrace,” the sheriff had said during a news conference. “An awful human being,” one survivor said on national television. “A blight on law enforcement,” said a police union. “A coward,” said President Trump. “When it came time to get in there and do something, he didn’t have the courage.”
Their words ran in a loop through his head, because all this time Peterson had been wondering, too: What more could he possibly have done? Why had he failed to save so many lives in the exact scenario he had spent so much of his career training for — to find and kill an active shooter? He had worked as a sheriff ’s deputy for 32 years, as a school resource officer for 28, and at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for nearly a decade. He was the lone deputy stationed at the school, sworn to serve and protect a community of students who called him “Dep,” honored him with awards, and invited him to proms and football games. He had been admired until a former student named Nikolas Cruz arrived at school with an AR-15; ever since, Peterson had been living inside those next seven minutes. He had briefly considered changing his name or moving out of state, but even if he could somehow outrun infamy and embarrassment, he had decided there was no escape from the questions and doubts that consumed him.
“It’s haunting,” Peterson said. “I’ve cut that day up a thousand ways with a million different what-if scenarios, but the bottom line is I was there to protect, and I lost 17.”
“Come on now,” Jim said. “It’s not all on you.”
“But that’s the perception,” Peterson said. “You’re a hero or a coward, and that’s it.”
“People are looking for someone to point to and blame,” Jim said. “They’re just trying to make sense of it.”
“I know,” Peterson said. “So am I.”
It was in some ways the most simple kind of crime to solve: committed by one perpetrator who had surrendered and then confessed within an hour, and yet months later half a dozen inquiries remained underway, each an attempt to derive sense and order from seven chaotic minutes. The FBI was reviewing its threat response. A governor’s commission was examining school security failures. The sheriff’s office was looking into radio malfunctions. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement was investigating the sheriff ’s office.
Peterson had been doing his own investigating, too, studying dozens of pages of documents inside his duplex. He’d re-watched surveillance footage and read witness statements, searching for a way to reconcile the deputy he believed he was with the coward who was maligned each day in the national news.
“How can they keep saying I did nothing?” he asked Rodriguez one morning, looking again through the documents on his kitchen table. “I’m getting on the radio to call in the shooting. I’m locking down the school. I’m clearing kids out of the courtyard. They have the video and the call logs. The evidence is sitting right there.”
“It’s easy to second guess when you’re in some conference room, spending months thinking about what you would have done,” Rodriguez said.
“There wasn’t even time to think,” Peterson said. “It just happened and I started reacting.”
He remembered being in his office on the afternoon of Feb. 14 when the first call came in to his school radio, as he was waiting to meet with a parent about a student’s fake driver’s license. On most days, that was his job: to police the small stuff — to chase down stolen cellphones, confiscate marijuana, lecture students for vaping in class, and break up the occasional hallway fight. Twice he had caught students with knives, but not once in the past decade had he encountered a gun. Stoneman Douglas was a high-achieving suburban school, with Audis in the student parking lot and packed PTA meetings each month. The school employed eight security guards to help monitor 13 buildings spread across 45 acres, but Peterson was the only person who carried a gun. “If I have to arrest you, then something has gone wrong,” Peterson often told students, because his role was less to be an enforcer of the law than a friendly reminder of it. He had worked before as a corrections guard and as a road officer arriving at the scenes of fatal car crashes and homicides, but it was his work as a school resource officer that had made him one of the most decorated deputies in Parkland.
“Possible firecracker,” came the call to his school radio at 2:21 p.m., from one of the school’s eight fulltime security guards. “Firecracker over by the 1200 building.”
“Probably a few kids acting like idiots,” Peterson remembered thinking, and he stood from his desk and walked out to investigate. His office was a few hundred yards from the 1200 building, and he was heading in that direction with a security guard when a fire alarm went off. Smoke from the firecracker had probably triggered the alarm, Peterson remembered thinking. He began running toward the 1200 building until one of the unarmed security guards swung by in a golf cart and offered him a ride. Peterson climbed onto the back and jumped off the cart about 20 yards from the 1200 building. The security guard drove away, and Peterson took a few steps toward the building before he heard two loud bangs.
He remembered being unsure whether the blasts were coming from outside or inside the building, or if someone was firing shots in the adjacent parking lot or sniping from the roof. He didn’t know, and no one was there to tell him, and he remembered reacting in those first seconds by doing what he believed he had been trained to do: taking cover in a tactical position so he could clear the area. He leaned his back against the wall of an adjacent building. He took out his gun and scanned the surrounding palm trees, the courtyard, the windows, the parking lot, and the roof. He waved at students who were walking through the courtyard and told them to clear the area. He reached for his school radio and gave a “Code Red” to lock down the school. He picked up his police radio for the first time just after 2:23 p.m.
“Please advise, we have possible, uh, could be firecrackers. I think we got shots fired. Possible shots fired, 1200 building,” he said, according to a recording of the radio traffic.
He remembered standing for the next several seconds with his back against the wall, scanning the area around the building for a possible shooter. Trees. Roof. Windows. Courtyard. Trees, roof, windows, courtyard. He could see much of campus from his position, but he couldn’t find a shooter. He remembered staying in place because he didn’t want to expose himself when he didn’t know where the shots were coming from. He remembered feeling certain the gunshots were coming from somewhere near or inside the 1200 building, but where?
“Make sure we get some units over here,” he said into the radio, still at 2:23 p.m. “I need to shut down Stoneman Douglas, the intersection.”
“We’re talking about the 1200 building,” he said, a few seconds later.
“We don’t have any description yet,” he said, at 2:24. “We just hear shots, what appear to be shots fired.”
How often had he envisioned this moment? How much time had he spent studying other mass shootings, imaging himself on scene, wondering how he’d react? He’d gone to annual conferences about school shootings, taken a class on confronting active shooters and led annual lockdown trainings for teachers. He had started his career as a school resource officer years before the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, back when the idea of a school shooting seemed farfetched, but now it was a possibility he carried in his mind as he walked around campus each day. Peterson had imagined what he would do if someone started firing in the crowded courtyard during lunch or at halftime of a football game. The ending he imagined was always the same: He identified the shooter. He engaged the shooter. He killed the shooter.
But now he stood against the wall, holding his radio in one hand and his gun in the other. He remembered wondering why he couldn’t locate the shots. Trees, roof, windows, courtyard. The fire alarm was still blaring. Police sirens were closing in from all directions. From Peterson’s position, he could see only the east side entrance to the 1200 building. Meanwhile, on the west side, at least one victim was already down.
Students inside the 1200 building were at that very moment flooding 911 with calls describing the exact location and description of the shooter, but it turned out that those calls were being routed not to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office but instead to the Coral Springs Police Department. Coral Springs officers were not yet on the scene, and even once they arrived, they communicated on a separate radio system from Peterson and the rest of Broward County. The only information being relayed to him was coming out of his Broward County radio, a soundtrack first of silence and then of mounting confusion as the shooting continued into its fourth minute.
“I hear shots fired by the football field!” shouted the second Broward County deputy to arrive. “Shots by the football field.”
“Some thought it was firecrackers. We’re not sure,” said the next deputy on site. “By the football field.”
“We also heard it over by, inside the 1200 building,” Peterson said, still standing in place. “We are locking down the school right now.”
“I got more students running west toward the football field,” another officer said.
“I hear shots fired,” Peterson said. “Shots — ”
“I have a gunshot victim,” said another deputy. “He is by the entrance to West Glades, on the west side of the school.”
“Does he know where the shooter is?” Peterson shouted, but now it was already six minutes into the massacre, and the last victim had already been shot on the third floor. According to reports, the gunman was dropping his AR-15 near the stairwell and then heading out of the building, blending in with the crowd of frantic students. The shooting Peterson was supposed over.
A Coral Springs SWAT team arrived almost five minutes later to clear the building, and Peterson left his position against the wall and ran to give them his set of master keys to the classroom doors. He passed by the entrance of the 1200 building for the first time, and there in the hall he could see two victims. He still didn’t know whether there were more. He still didn’t know anything about the identity or the location of the shooter. He stayed on the scene for the next several hours, helping to move bodies as the death toll mounted, and later that night he went home to Rodriguez. She had been sure he was dead the moment she heard the report of “one victim” on the television news. They had talked dozens of time about how he would be the first person through the door to confront a shooter. But instead, here he was, stammering over his words, the grief and self-doubt already beginning as he tried to make sense of why 17 people were dead and 17 were injured and the only dirt on his uniform was from where his back had been pressed against the wall.
“I couldn’t get him,” he remembered telling Rodriguez that day, before anyone else had begun to assign blame. “It was my job, and I didn’t find him.”
In his sleep he was still looking, still scanning the roof, windows and courtyard, only to awaken each morning to the fresh realization of the same result. He had gone to see a psychologist and a psychiatrist after the shooting, and he had come home with a prescription to help him sleep and also a sheet describing the symptoms he had begun to experience: “Confusion.” “Anxiety.” “Guilt.” “Grief.” “Agitation.” “Obsession.”
“Why didn’t I hear more shots?” he said one morning, sifting again through the manila folder as Rodriguez sat nearby. “It doesn’t make sense. I should have heard them, but I didn’t.”
“If I heard more shots, I might have known where to find him,” Peterson said.
“If I knew where he was, I could have gone in.”
He hadn’t eaten or slept for two days after the shooting, sick with what he assumed was survivor’s guilt. In those first days, the sheriff’s office had invited him to shake Trump’s hand and be congratulated along with other first responders, but Peterson had chosen to stay home. “Nothing good happened that day,” he remembered telling his supervisor.
He gave his official statement to homicide investigators two days after the massacre, attended two funerals, and used sick days to finish out the first week. He was preparing to return to work when he got a call from internal affairs eight days after the shooting. The sheriff’s office had reviewed surveillance tapes and watched as Peterson stood against the wall. Sheriff Scott Israel offered him two choices: He could be suspended indefinitely without pay, or he could retire with his full pension, an annual payment of nearly $100,000. Peterson had little money saved, two exwives, alimony payments and a mortgage on the duplex he’d bought out of foreclosure with $100 down. He didn’t see it as a choice. He signed his retirement papers, and about an hour later the sheriff released more details about the shooting. The country was demanding an explanation, and for the first time he gave them something or someone to blame.
“One deputy was remiss, dereliction of duty,” Israel said. “And that’s Peterson.”
“I’ve cut that day up a thousand ways with a million different what-if scenarios, but the bottom line is I was there to protect, and I lost 17.”
Scot Peterson