The more we learn about the law enforcement response, or lack thereof, to the Parkland school shooting, the worse the situation gets.
Scot Peterson, the armed school deputy who stayed outside while 17 people were murdered claimed he heard shots outside of the school, which would explain his failure to engage the shooter. Peterson resigned after being placed on unpaid suspension for his failure to act.
Peterson’s version of the story from CNN:
Peterson, who was armed on campus, did not enter the school because he believed the shooting was coming from outside the school buildings, according to attorney Joseph DiRuzzo III.”Let there be no mistake, Mr. Peterson wishes that he could have prevented the untimely passing of the seventeen victims on that day, and his heart goes out to the families of the victims in their time of need,” the statement from DiRuzzo says.”However, the allegations that Mr. Peterson was a coward and that his performance, under the circumstances, failed to meet the standards of police officers are patently untrue.”
“Patently untrue,” you say?
Internal radio dispatches made public by the Broward County Sheriff’s Department Thursday appear to contradict Peterson’s story. According to those dispatches, Peterson said he heard gunfire “inside” the school. Worse still, “just as school shooter Nikolas Cruz was fleeing the building after killing 17 people, Peterson warned his fellow officers to stay away,” reports the Miami Herald:
But internal radio dispatches released by the Broward Sheriff’s Office Thursday show Peterson immediately fixated on Building 12 and even radioed that gunfire was happening “inside.”And, just as school shooter Nikolas Cruz was fleeing the building after killing 17 people, Peterson warned his fellow officers to stay away — even as wounded students and staff lay inside.BSO policy calls for deputies to engage an active shooter and eliminate the threat.“Do not approach the 12 or 1300 building, stay at least 500 feet away,” a panicked Peterson shouted as people screamed in the background….But Peterson, according to the timeline and radio dispatches reviewed by the Miami Herald, remained focused on Building 12.“All right… We also heard it’s by, inside the 1200,” Peterson said at 2:25 p.m.
But that’s not all. The second by second timeline also shows that it was eleven minutes before anyone entered the school.
It was at 2:32 — 11 minutes after the shooting began — that four Coral Springs officers and two BSO deputies made the first police entrance into the building, helping to “extract a victim.”
Eleven minutes.
We’ve covered this story extensively. For previous posts, see here.
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