Deputy a no-show for hearing.
Scot Peterson, the disgraced Broward sheriff’s deputy who hid in a stairwell during the Parkland school shooting, refused to appear Thursday before the state commission investigating the massacre.
Peterson’s lawyer, Joseph DiRuzzo, stepped up to the lectern in the commission’s meeting room in Sunrise and made a brief statement.
“As you can tell, Mr. Peterson is not here,” he said. “Mr. Peterson will not be testifying today. Earlier this morning, I filed a complaint with the court, seeking to quash this subpoena.”
He said the complaint asked the court to declare the subpoena illegal and hold members of the commission liable.
“I have copies of the complaint here,” he said. “I will leave them.”
Bob Gualtieri, the Pinellas County sheriff who serves as chairman of the commission, said Peterson’s refusal to appear before the commission came as a surprise, since his lawyer had said he would comply with the subpoena.
“Just so everybody knows, the attorney who just appeared was contacted on Nov. 8 and he accepted service on behalf of Mr. Peterson, and he told us that Mr. Peterson would appear,” he said. “So we were operating under the premise, based on the representation of the lawyer who showed up and left that Mr. Peterson would be here.”
The next step would typically be to go to court and ask for the court to hold Peterson in contempt for failing to comply with the subpoena. He said the commission’s general counsel will first review the lawsuit before they decide how to proceed.
In Peterson’s lawsuit, Peterson accuses the commission of improperly using its civil power to issue subpoenas to assist what appears to be an open criminal investigation into Peterson’s actions by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
A news release regarding the lawsuit accuses the commission of ignoring a long list of facts favorable to Peterson, such as his reasons for taking up his position and for believing that the shooter may have been outside.
“Instead of being a neutral fact-finding body, the Commission has succumbed to the not-so-thinly veiled personal agendas of the Commission members,” the news release states.
Ryan Petty, a commission member who lost his daughter Alaina in the attack, found Peterson’s failure to show up to be consistent with the character he displayed during the shooting.
“In my view, he’s not a cop,” he said. “Any man that would stand there while innocent children and teachers are being slaughtered for 45 minutes, I’m not surprised he wouldn’t show up.”
Max Schachter, a commission member whose son Alex was killed in the attack, was surprised at Peterson’s absence, having expected him to show up and invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
“He‘s a piece of garbage. He could have gone in and save six children’s lives and he chose to do nothing. After al those other officers went into the line of fire with the chance of them being killed, he stood behind a concrete pillar for 45 minutes and did nothing. He’s a despicable human being.”
Peterson, the only law enforcement officer on campus when the shooting started, took cover in a stairwell near the building where the massacre was taking place, never making any attempt to confront the killer. His conduct make him a subject of national ridicule as the “Coward of Broward” and drew scorn from members of the commission, who said he lied about his actions to cover up his failures that day.
Peterson’s conduct was the most egregious of what many commissioners felt was an inadequate performance by the Broward Sheriff ’s Office. During testimony Thursday morning, an investigator for the commission described what some felt was a leisurely response by deputies, who delayed to put on bulletproof vests, make other preparations and discuss what to do.
“It would appear there’s not a tremendous sense of urgency,” said state Sen. Lauren Book, a member of the commission, after viewing videos of the sheriff’s deputies at the scene. “Is that common?”
The response of Capt. Jan Jordan, who had been in charge of the Parkland district for the sheriff ’s office, was criticized.
In a statement to investigators, Broward Sheriff’s Lt. Stephen O’Neill described a “dream-like” nature to her speech and said the initial command structure was “ineffective” and “not engaged with the problem.”
During a break, Gualtieri said similar statements were made by others about Jordan.
“I can tell you there are others, and you’ll hear more from them, that described Capt. Jordan as being over her head,” he said.
The response of the sheriff’s deputies was contrasted with the quick action by officers in the Coral Springs Police Department. Coral Springs Sgt. Scott Myers told the commission’s investigators that he thought the situation was so urgent that he couldn’t take the time to go into his trunk for his rifle.
“I made the decision to go in with my handgun,” he said. “I have an AR-15 and a .308 (rifle) in my trunk. The decision to go into my trunk and unsecure the AR-15 in my mind would take too long. I felt like every second mattered, and I made the conscious decision to run in with my handgun instead of arming myself with the rifle, knowing full-well that the rifle was one thousand times better than the handgun. … I had to make the decision that seconds mattered.”
During a break, Gualtieri described the unhurried approach of some of the sheriff’s deputies as the wrong response to an urgent situation in which lives were being lost.
“You don’t have the right to sit there and say I’m going to put my vest on,” he said. “Every time a shot is going off, that means someone’s getting killed. That’s what you have to assume. And when you hear a volley of gunfire and you’re going to the trunk of your car to get your vest out, that’s a problem. You need to go, and you need to go in now because seconds do matter.”
More questions about Peterson’s credibility came up Thursday, as commissioners heard recordings of radio transmissions from that day. In the aftermath of the shooting, the former deputy made statements that he was unsure where the shooting had been coming from, as a way of explaining why he didn’t go into the 1200 building.
In one recording, a Coral Springs police detective asked Peterson if he knew where the shooter was, and Peterson responded, “I believe he’s on the 3rd floor,” according a timeline of events presented.
That response surprised Petty, whose daughter was killed in the shooting. He notes that Peterson never entered the building.
“Not only is he making things up, he’s creating more confusion and delaying the response,” Petty said.
The panel must produce a report to the state Legislature by Jan. 1 outlining systemic failures in mental health care, school policies, and police response surrounding the massacre of 17 students and educators.