School officer stayed outside during massacre
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The armed officer on duty at the Florida school where a shooter killed 17 people never went inside to engage the gunman and has been placed under investigation, officials announced yesterday.
The school resource officer at the high school took up a position viewing the western entrance of the building that was under attack for more than four minutes, but “he never went in,” Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said at a news conference. The shooting lasted about six minutes.
The officer, Scot Peterson, was suspended without pay and placed under investigation, then chose to resign, Israel said. When asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said the deputy should have “went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer.”
The sheriff said he was “devastated, sick to my stomach. There are no words. I mean, these families lost their children. I’ve been to the funerals. I’ve been to the vigils. There are no words.”
There was also a communication issue between the person reviewing the school’s security system footage and officers who responded to the school.
Coral Springs police Chief Tony Pustizzi said the footage being reviewed was 20 minutes old, so the responding officers were hearing that the shooter was in a certain place while officers already in that location were saying that wasn’t the case. “There was nothing wrong with their equipment. Their equipment works,” Pustizzi said. “It’s just that when the person was reviewing the tape from 20 minutes earlier, somehow that wasn’t communicated to the officers that it was a 20-minute delay.”
Pustizzi said the confusion didn’t put anyone in danger.
The shooting suspect, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, has been jailed on 17 counts of murder and has admitted carrying out the attack. He owned a collection of weapons. Defense attorneys, state records and people who knew him indicate that he displayed behavioral troubles for years.
A former cop who now trains first responders said waiting to make a move can cost lives. That lesson was learned, he said, after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., where 13 people — including 12 students — were murdered and the two perpetrators took their own lives.
“You need to speed up the response,” said the trainer, who asked to remain anonymous because he did not want to directly criticize the Florida situation. “Having four officers is the gold standard. Going in solo is extremely dangerous. But it’s up to the individual officer.”