And you thought the details of what happened in Parkland couldn’t have made the Broward County Sheriff’s Department look any worse. First we learned that the BCSD had 39 prior encounters with the shooter before he opened fire in the school. Then it was disclosed that school resource officer Scot Peterson, and then some of his fellow deputies, stayed outside while the shooting was going on, listening to the sounds of students and teachers being murdered.
Peterson, it seems, had earlier done Sheriff Scott Israel a solid by allegedly covering up a sexual assault charge against Israel’s son, an assault that happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High.
When backup arrived outside the school, rather than enter and engage the shooter — something that had been standard law enforcement tactics ever since Columbine — they were instead ordered to remain outside the building and form a perimeter, a delay that no doubt cost more lives inside.
Now, according to the Miami Herald, not only did Sheriff’s Israel’s finest fail to enter the school and challenge the shooter, but the captain in charge that day — the one who ordered the perimeter — also prevented EMTs from going in, letting victims bleed to death.
During the chaos of the Parkland school shooting, paramedics from Coral Springs-Parkland Fire Department were desperate to go inside the building where students were wounded and dying.
Michael McNally, deputy chief for Coral Springs fire-rescue, asked six times for permission to send in specialized teams of police officers and paramedics, according to an incident report he filed after the Feb. 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that left 17 people dead.
But every time McNally asked to deploy the two Rescue Task Force teams — each made up of three paramedics and three to four law enforcement officers — the Broward Sheriff’s Office captain in charge of the scene, Jan Jordan, said no.
Captain Jordan, who had virtually no tactical command experience before being brought into the Broward County Sheriff’s Department by Sheriff Israel, dithered.
“The [BSO] incident commander advised me, ‘She would have to check,’ ” McNally wrote in the report released Thursday by Coral Springs. “After several minutes, I requested once again the need to deploy RTF elements into the scene to … initiate treatment as soon as possible. Once again, the incident commander expressed that she ‘would have to check before approving this request.’ “
You may remember that the shooter actually escaped the school that day by dropping his gun and filing out with all of the other students after the massacre. He bought a drink at a nearby Subway and strolled into a McDonald’s before he was eventually found and arrested. Meanwhile, back at the school . . .
Even after the shooter had been arrested, the answer remained the same.
Capt. Jordan still keep the EMTs out of the building for some unspecified, inexplicable amount of time.
But remember, this was all the NRA’s fault. They’re the ones with blood on their hands.
This wasn’t a law enforcement travesty and had absolutely nothing to do with departmental incompetence or cowardice on the part of the Broward County Sheriff. The NRA is the reason the shooter was never arrested, even after the BCSD and the FBI had received dozens of reports about his violent, disturbing behavior, including fights and bringing a knife to school.
NRA members practically stood in the schoolhouse doors that terrible day, keeping Scot Peterson and his pals from getting into the building. It was NRA leadership who advised setting up the perimeter rather than going inside to stop the shooting.
And now we learn that when Capt. Jordan delayed even further, repeatedly telling EMT’s “she would have to check” if they could enter the building and tend to the wounded, no one at the NRA’s Fairfax headquarters would give her the go-ahead she so desperately wanted.
How could the NRA have been so heartless and uncaring?