FORT LAUDERDALE — A Broward jury is deciding whether a sheriff’s deputy should face jail for allegedly putting his own life ahead of the children at the Parkland school shooting in 2018 – or whether he is a scapegoat for failures and decisions of others.
It is the first time a U.S. law enforcement officer has been tried in connection with a school shooting.
In closing statements, prosecutors told jurors Deputy Scot Peterson could have located and stopped Nikolas Cruz as he carried out the attack inside the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17.
Instead of opening a door, looking in a window or seeking information from fleeing students, he chose to take shelter, prosecutor Kristen Gomes told the jury.
“Choose to go in or choose to run? Scot Peterson chose to run,” Gomes said. “When the defendant ran, he left behind an unrestricted killer who spent the next four minutes and 15 seconds wandering the halls at his leisure.”
But Peterson’s attorney, Mark Eiglarsh, argued that Peterson — who was not wearing a bulletproof vest — is being made a “sacrificial lamb” for failures by elected officials and administrators. He said the evidence proves Peterson’s insistence that the gunshots’ echoes prevented him from pinpointing Cruz’s location, and that Peterson did everything he could under the circumstances. Criticizing his actions now is “Monday morning quarterbacking” using facts that were unknown to Peterson in real time.
He said the only person responsible for what happened that day is “that monster” Cruz. He said two dozen students, teachers and others testified that they also could not pinpoint where the shots were coming from — some of them from inside the building where the shooting happened.
“This whole hearing-based prosecution is flawed and offensive,” Eiglarsh said. He said Peterson acted heroically during the shooting, staying put to transmit whatever information he had and would have charged into the building if he knew where the shooter was. But if he did that or went elsewhere without solid information and the shooter then killed others where Peterson had left, he would have been prosecuted for that.
“He was damned no matter what,” Eiglarsh said.
Peterson, 60, is being tried for felony child neglect and other charges for the deaths and injuries on the third floor. He is not charged in connection with the deaths of 11 people killed on the first floor before he reached the building. It is the first time a U.S. law enforcement officer has been tried in connection with a school shooting.
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Peterson faces up to nearly 100 years in prison if convicted, although because of his clean record a sentence anywhere near that length is highly unlikely. He could also lose his $104,000 annual pension. He had spent nearly three decades working at schools, including nine years at Stoneman Douglas. He retired shortly after the shooting and was then fired retroactively.
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