State inquiry into Parkland shooting reveals broader security failure

But a state commission that has been investigating the Feb. 14 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for the past 10 months found that the shortfall in the police response went much further: Seven other sheriff’s deputies who raced to the school and heard gunshots also stayed outside the building, the commission found, and officers lost even more time scrambling to retrieve bulletproof vests from their cars.

The draft report released Wednesday by no means lifted blame from Peterson, who the investigation showed had told some of the other officers to stay away from the building where students were being gunned down. But it pointed to a range of other failures on the part of school and law enforcement officials that likely contributed to a shooting so deadly that it set off a national youth movement against gun violence.

A campus security monitor saw the gunman enter the building and was suspicious, but did nothing to alert students. Mental health counselors knew the gunman was troubled, but never had a complete picture of just how dangerous he had become.

In a separate set of statements released by the authorities Wednesday, officers described a bloody, chaotic scene as they arrived.

“It’s basically like a ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ” Hank Juntunen, a sheriff’s deputy, said of the scene he and other officers encountered on the third floor of the school building where the shooting occurred.

The 22 officers interviewed as part of the commission’s investigation described radios that did not work, and problems communicating between law enforcement agencies and medical responders.

“I couldn’t key up” on the radio, Deputy Brian Hayes said, describing his attempts to call paramedics to help the injured. “Like, it was just a tone, a tone, a tone.”

The Parkland Commission’s 400-page draft report, based on a detailed examination of timelines, emergency response records and testimony from witnesses, police, school officials and others, called for a full internal evaluation of the police response, given the commission’s finding that eight deputies from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office ignored protocol for active shooters that calls for pursuing a gunman to try to disarm him.

Other officers who came later did go in as soon as they arrived, the report noted.

“None of these BSO deputies immediately responded to the gun shots by entering the campus and seeking out the shooter,” the report said. “Deputy sheriffs who took the time to retrieve vests from containers in their cruisers, removed certain equipment they were wearing so that they could put on their vests, and then replaced the equipment they had removed all while shots were being fired, or had been recently fired, is unacceptable and contrary to accepted protocol.”

Sheriff Scott Israel, a Democrat who has been widely criticized for defending his office’s response to the shooting, has already placed two of the deputies on restricted duty. When he testified before the commission last month, he had few answers as to why his officers did not pursue the gunman.

“You just can’t measure heart,” Israel said.

His office will conduct its own investigation after receiving the commission’s final findings on Jan. 1, Israel said in a statement Wednesday.

The commission’s report still could be revised, but lists tentative findings and recommendations to local officials and state lawmakers, including a controversial suggestion that the state consider allowing teachers who volunteer for training to carry weapons to school. The commission, led by the Republican sheriff of Pinellas County, Bob Gualtieri, has not made any recommendations related to gun policy.

“Classroom teachers cannot and should not be distracted with the responsibility of being armed inside a classroom, even if they think they want to,” Debbie Hixon, a Broward County schoolteacher whose husband, Chris Hixon, was killed in the Stoneman Douglas High attack, told the commission Wednesday in Tallahassee. “The probability of something going wrong clearly outweighs that one time that there may be a shooting in the classroom.”

Florida already tightened gun laws and introduced a number of school safety requirements in the wake of the shooting. But change has proved expensive and slow, frustrating parents of the Parkland victims, including two fathers who sit on the commission. Israel and Superintendent Robert W. Runcie of the Broward County public school district have said they are awaiting the final commission findings to make more personnel moves or adopt new policies, if needed.

“We are studying the observations to deepen our understanding of what happened, who was responsible, and what might have been done differently,” Kathy Koch, a spokeswoman for the school district, said in a statement Wednesday.

Last month, the school district reassigned three Stoneman Douglas assistant principals and a security specialist as a result of the commission investigation, which identified a number of security failures, beginning with a pedestrian gate left open and unsupervised that allowed the accused gunman, a former student who should not have been on campus, to walk into the school.

An unarmed campus security monitor saw the gunman walking toward the freshman building carrying a suspicious bag. “Something inside me told me not to approach him,” the security monitor told the sheriff’s office.

But the security monitor did not chase after the gunman or go on his school radio to call a “code red.”

The gunman entered the building immediately after three students, who were unaware that someone suspicious was just steps behind them. Two of those students, Martin Duque, 14, and Luke Hoyer, 15, were among the first fatalities. The third student was injured.

On Wednesday, Gualtieri criticized the security monitor — who has since been fired, along with a second security monitor — for failing to alert the students or anyone else about the gunman’s presence. A code red was called by a third security monitor more than three minutes into the shooting. Two other security monitors, Aaron Feis and Hixon, ran into the building and were killed.

“There could have been a serious mitigation of this if people had been notified and had an opportunity to react,” Gualtieri said.

Some students were hurt because there was nowhere for them to hide. Only two of 30 classrooms in the freshman building had clearly marked “hard corners” where students would not be seen by an attacker peering in through the glass pane on the classroom door. In several other classrooms, the hard corners were obstructed by furniture, including teachers’ desks, and were too small to fit all the students, leaving some of them exposed.

“Cruz only shot people within his line of sight and he never entered any classroom,” the draft report said, referring to the accused gunman, Nikolas Cruz.

The report said Cruz began searching shootings online months before the rampage. Investigators found that he used his cellphone on Nov. 14, 2017, to search for “shooting people massacre.” Several Instagram accounts linked to Cruz also included posts about killing people, and Cruz wrote several notes in his cellphone expressing his desire to hurt others.

“Everything and everyone is happy except for me I want to kill people but I don’t know how I can do it,” he wrote in a note on Jan. 21.

Beginning in February, in the days leading up to the shooting, Cruz’s online activity related to violence appeared to increase. He searched for Wikipedia entries, news articles and videos about past shootings, including at Columbine High School in Colorado and at Virginia Tech; viewed videos and forums about shooting with a rifle; and typed in a chilling internet search query: “is killing people easy.”

He took a screenshot of the Stoneman Douglas school schedule and of a psychology article regarding “homicidal thoughts or urges.” On Feb. 8, he recorded a video of himself saying he would go upstairs at a Stoneman Douglas building and shoot into the main school courtyard. Investigators found that Cruz, who had a legally purchased AR-15 assault rifle, tried to shoot from the third floor of the freshman building into crowds of students outside, but his bullets could not penetrate the windows’ hurricane-resistant glass.

Cruz, now 20, was arrested in a residential neighborhood near the school on the day of the shooting. He confessed to the police and was charged with capital murder. He is in jail awaiting trial, though his public defenders have said he would plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison.

Perhaps the most troubling of the commission’s findings was that the shooting’s grim death toll could have been even higher.

About 800 students, teachers and staff were in the freshman building that day, according to the report. On the third floor, people could not immediately hear the shooting on the two floors below. More than 100 students filed out of their classrooms there and into the hallway after hearing the fire alarm set off by the gunman’s shots. Only when a teacher standing by the stairwell realized what was going on did most of those children return to the relative safety of their classrooms — before the gunman made it to the third floor.

Six minutes into his rampage, the gunman dropped his weapon and left the building, blending in with hundreds of other students who were evacuating.

The report noted one other detail from its findings: He left behind 180 rounds of ammunition.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

State inquiry into Parkland shooting reveals broader security failure

MIAMI — In the weeks after a deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, widespread criticism was focused on Scot Peterson, the armed sheriff’s deputy who heard the exploding gunfire but failed to run in and try to stop the massacre.

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