BCPS ends quest to get social media posts

The Broward school district rescinded its effort Thursday to obtain the Facebook posts of the families of the victims of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, lamenting that media coverage painted their motion in an unfair light.

Attorney Eugene Pettis, who represents the school district, told Broward Circuit Judge Patti Englander Henning on Thursday that he was concerned with moving the case forward and was concentrating on aspects where the district and the plaintiffs could agree.

Multiple victims and family members have sued the school district, the school resource officer on the scene, the Broward Sheriff’s Office, school staff members who allegedly didn’t do enough to help, and shooter Nikolas Cruz in a series of lawsuits all coming before Judge Englander Henning.

In response, the district has requested information that is not unusual in such cases, such as mental health records and social media posts, but has met with resistance from plaintiffs.

In earlier motions, Pettis defended the requests as part of his duty to adequately defend his client, the taxpayer-funded school district. Efforts to interview him after Thursday’s hearing were unsuccessful.

Pettis didn’t definitively answer the question when the judge asked him whether he will revisit the request for social media posts at a future date.

Cruz shot and killed 17 people at the Parkland high school on Valentine’s Day 2018, and he wounded 17 more. Lawsuits have been filed by the families of the dead, survivors and others who were not physically wounded but were at the school and traumatized by what they witnessed. The school district is accused of negligence in failing to identify Cruz as a lethal threat before he went on his rampage.

Cruz is facing the death penalty if convicted at his criminal trial.

In the civil case, the judge said she was hopeful that the trial would be able to go to a jury in 2022 without being hampered by COVID restrictions.