RECORDS DETAIL BLUNDERS

Miscommunication led police to think Parkland shooter was still in building when he wasn’t

Fresh details emerged Monday about another of the key blunders in the response to the Parkland massacre — miscommunication about video that led police to think the shooter was still in the three-story Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when he wasn’t.

The mistake meant that officers proceeded more with extreme caution and most paramedics, for their own safety, were not permitted to enter the school.

“Had we known the shooter wasn’t there, we probably could have flooded that building a lot faster knowing that we’re just going to go in there and just start trying to recover victims and wounded people,” George Schmidt, a member of Coral Springs Police Department’s SWAT operations team, told investigators, according to transcripts of interviews with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Prosecutors in Broward also revealed additional testimony that touched on the delayed video and how it affected the rescue efforts at the high school, where 17 people were fatally shot on Valentine’s Day. A former student, Nikolas Cruz, entered the 1200 Building on campus and strode through the hallways, shooting into classrooms with an AR-15 assault-style rifle. He’s in jail, awaiting trial.

The video delay was first reported by the South Florida Sun Sentinel a week after the shooting, but it was not clear how the misunderstanding occurred in the desperate, chaotic scene, made worse by radio communication failures. The newly released records reveal that school officials were the ones who rewound the video and that critical act was not clearly articulated, leading police to believe they were getting live information on the gunman’s whereabouts.

Hearing a fire alarm, Jeff Morford, assistant principal, raced outside his office to help with an evacuation and encountered a sheriff ’s deputy, Scot Peterson, in a breezeway. The deputy, who is assigned to the school, yelled: “Code Red,” meaning a lockdown and possible active shooter, and told Moford to get back to the school’s camera room to pull up the security video.

By the time Morford arrived, school Security Specialist Kelvin Greenleaf was already there, but the pair didn’t see any trouble on the live feed video. So they rewound it. “We ran the — it back so we could see what was going on,” Morford told investigators.

“Mr. Greenleaf was running the camera. I was sitting beside him as we were watching,” Morford said. “Then I got on my my radio and was telling Deputy Peterson what … I saw.”

Peterson was standing outside the 1200 Building and heard the gunfire but never ran in to accost the attacker. He’s been vilified for his cowardice and is being sued for negligence by parents.

Morford said he could not remember whether he told Peterson that the video was rewound.

A fact-finding commission set up by law to review the massacre, found that Morford broadcast over the school radio that Cruz had left the third floor and was ‘going back down toward the second floor.”

That was about 2:53 pm.

But Cruz had already left the third floor 26 minutes earlier and was quickly out of the building. He fled and was later caught walking through a neighborhood.

Only Peterson had a school radio, and those conversations are not recorded. But Morford was communicating with another assistant principal, Winfred Porter, who was standing outside next to Broward Sheriff’s Sgt. Richard Rossman.

At about 2:55 pm. Porter broadcast that Cruz had moved from the third floor to the second floor but quickly then told Rossman the video was on a delay and asked to be taken to the camera room, the commission found.

Rossman, however, was having radio problems and was distracted.

He didn’t broadcast over his police radio that there was a delay in the video for another crucial 7 minutes.

Rossman testified that one of the issues he was handling was what to do with children with disabilities who were outside, pushed up against a wall, near him. They could not run.

“Somebody made a decision to start taking kids out of that building. And the kids that were coming out of this building were handicapped children with cerebral palsy, in wheelchairs. I had no way I could protect them,” he told investigators.

Inside the 1200 Building, minutes and seconds counted.

Police who ran into the building carried out the injured to other waiting deputies and there were some SWAT medics inside. But other paramedics were begging for permission to enter and were denied because officials still believed the gunman was inside the building.

Sergeant Christopher Palmara of the Sheriff’s Office said: “They brought a young lady down form the third floor. I guess she had a pulse up top. When they got back downstairs … she was gone.”

Grant Lasseter, a Fire Rescue SWAT Team medic, told investigators he had heard that the shooter was “going from one floor to the next.”

He and those with him were concentrating on getting to and treating the wounded.

“I do remember hearing that because they were sending guys like, ‘Oh, third floor, room whatever,’ and they’d get up there and they’d say, ‘Oh, now he’s moving back through’ and it was – it was just mayhem for maybe five or 10 minutes.”

Christopher Mazzola, a deputy at the time and now a firefighter paramedic, went up to the third floor with a team, believing the shooter was still in the building.

“Personally I didn’t think he was, because they were saying on the radio that he’s shooting … and I didn’t hear anything. I knew there was some sort of issue. Either we had the wrong building or it was delayed information.”

As they cleared the third floor room by room, they learned Cruz had been captured.

Broward Sheriff’s Lt. Brian Montgomery, stationed in Deerfield Beach, jumped into his car after getting a text from his niece inside the school, saying someone was shooting. He pulled up and was putting on his gear when a Stoneman Douglas administrator watching security video on an iPad told him: “He’s on the third floor! He’s on the third floor! He’s got smoke bombs!”

Montgomery ran up to the building, but a Coral Springs officer stopped him, saying: “The video’s delayed! .. .It’s bad info. It’s bad info!”

Asked about the primary obstacle officers faced inside the building, Brad Mock, Coral Springs Police captain, said: “The biggest thing is: Where is this guy?”

“Hands down, where is this guy, and, you know, is he taking a stronghold, does he have hostages, you know, are shots going to start popping off again, you know, do I have resources in place where no matter where that goes, we can get there? That was — to me, that was the biggest obstacle.”

Said Schmidt: “If we had known that our shooter was 100 percent out of the building, I think, yeah, you would have moved faster … everybody would have moved faster through the building.”