New video emerged Wednesday showing former Broward County Sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson hiding outside as a young gunman murders students inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The former school-resource officer, the only person with a gun present at the school when gunman Nikolas Cruz began firing, was forced to resign and labeled the “Coward of Broward” after surveillance video showed he took cover 69 feet away from the building instead of entering and confronting Cruz, a former student.
New video and audio of police radio calls show Peterson, who kept his pension, ordered officers to stay 500 feet away from the building and ordered intersections to be blocked as the attack unfolded. The disgraced deputy also neglected to provide an initial radio report of the shooting to the Broward Sheriff’s Office, letting precious minutes go by. A full eleven minutes elapsed from when the gunman began his rampage to when the first police officer entered the school.
The video and audio, which juxtapose Peterson’s actions to an animation of the shooter’s movements, were shown Wednesday to the state commission investigating the shooting, by which Peterson has been subpoenaed to testify next month, the commission chairman said.
Peterson has defended himself by saying he suspected the shots may have been coming from outside the building.
“If you’re a responding Broward Sheriff’s deputy, and you have the deputy that’s on campus, who’s there in the best position, telling you what to do — i.e. lockdown intersections — they’re going to do what the guy who’s on campus is telling them to do,” said commission chairman Bob Gualtieri, the Pinellas County sheriff. “Coral Springs didn’t hear that direction. So Coral Springs is coming right in. Why are they coming right in? Because they weren’t hearing this nonsense direction about locking down intersections.”
“Don’t tell me that he loved these kids,” said commission member Max Schachter, who lost his son Alex in the shooting. “If they were his kids he would have gone in, he would have saved them. He let our children be slaughtered. He did nothing. He’s no police officer, no law-enforcement officer. Anybody with a badge would have done something. He did nothing. I hope he rots in hell.”
The possibility of criminal charges for Peterson on the basis of professional negligence is “being investigated by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement,” Gualtieri said.
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