Florida school shooting surveillance video shows officer Scot Peterson standing outside as massacre takes place
Mr Peterson has pushed back on the notion that he did not respond appropriately
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Your support makes all the difference.Surveillance footage form Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shows former school resource officer Scot Peterson and his response to the shooting — which has been criticised after it was disclosed that he did not immediately enter and confront the shooter — there last month.
The video, which media organisations petitioned the judge overseeing the case to release, was released Thursday and does not provide incredible detail, but does show Mr Peterson as he hears about the shooting before speaking into a radio handset on his shoulder and rushing over to the site of the shooting. Seventeen students and faculty were killed during the attack.
After that initial footage, the details in the footage illuminate very little further than that he travelled to the building, and apparently did not immediately enter.
After speaking into his radio, Mr Peterson can be seen making his way to the building where students were being murdered in a golf cart. One of the angles that followed that progression showed the golf cart travelling down a corridor.
A final shot, which lasts roughly 26 minutes, shows what police say is Mr Peterson outside of the building — at least for a portion of the clip — while pixelated students file past him. It is hard to tell from the video if Mr Peterson is actually in the clip at times, as the figures are indistinguishable in the upper corner of the shot.
Mr Peterson was suspended, and then resigned, after the shooting when Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel reviewed video footage of the shooting, and heard witness accounts that indicated the former school resource officer had waited to enter the building during the massacre.
Since then, Mr Peterson has fought back on the characterization of him as a coward, saying through that he had provided valuable help to the special forces team that entered the building. That included providing those officers with keys to the building, as well as providing them with a drawn diagram of the building they were entering.
Mr Peterson has also said that he believed that the shooter was outside of the building, not inside where the killings took place.
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