The sheriff’s deputy assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was more prepared to fix a pipe than confront a killer, a security watchman suggested.
Before the 17 murders last year, school resource officer Scot Peterson spent much of his days watching home-improvement videos, campus monitor Andrew Medina said in testimony.
“He wasn’t the guy that was shining up his stuff and ready to go to do something. … To be honest with you, he would stay on his computer and watch YouTube all day,” Medina said of Peterson, who later took cover behind a pole outside the freshman building as children were shot inside.
Medina painted a picture of Peterson as a “nice guy” who joked at how unprepared he was for action, telling Medina: “When I pull out (my) gun, French fries will come out.”
The South Florida Sun Sentinel reviewed the deposition Medina gave in a lawsuit against him as well as statements he made to a state commission, the Broward Sheriff’s Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
What emerges are more indications that administrators and security staff in control of Stoneman Douglas were wholly unprepared for a major threat of violence, despite a history of school shootings across the United States over two decades.
Medina likened the atmosphere at Stoneman Douglas, a sprawling campus in the wealthy suburb of Parkland, to a country club.
“They didn’t take security serious,” he said. “It was very laid back, very chill, very like they didn’t want no problem. They didn’t want the community to hear of anything that was going on in the school.”
For example, Medina said, he got a report that a student had “a big knife in the school,” but there was no lockdown and no public notice. “They went and got the kid, then … expelled the kid,” Medina said, adding “nobody ever heard about that.”
Both Medina and Peterson are key figures in the shooting, which killed 14 students and three staff members on Feb. 14, 2018. If either of them had confronted the 19-year-old gunman, Nikolas Cruz, the massacre may have been averted or fewer people shot, relatives of the dead contend.
Medina was the first to see the gunman on campus but did not call a Code Red to lock down the school.
He was let go from his school security job last year and Peterson resigned in disgrace. The parents of Meadow Pollack, one of the dead children, are suing both for negligence.
District spokeswoman Cathleen Brennan declined to comment on Medina’s assertions because of “ongoing litigation and investigations.”
Asked whether any of Medina’s depictions of Peterson were true, Michael Piper, an attorney for Peterson said: “Absolutely no comment to anything that comes out of Medina’s mouth. I’m not going to justify any of that nonsense with even a comment.”
The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission noted disparities in Medina’s statements to authorities. Medina acknowledges as much, saying in his deposition that he got things “mashed up” in his mind in the emotional toll of the tragedy.
Still, Medina’s testimony provides an insider’s view of the school’s culture and its security measures in the years and months leading up to the shooting.
Observe and report
Marjory Stoneman Douglas is one of Broward County’s largest high schools with more than 3,000 students spread over 45 acres and 14 buildings. In addition to Deputy Peterson, the school had one security specialist who oversaw seven campus monitors like Medina.
Stoneman Douglas now has four deputies, three security specialists and 12 monitors.
According to Medina, his job was just to observe or “monitor” — and report concerns to someone higher up. He was paid $18,392 a year.
He recalled an incident in the locker room years ago when a kid “was cursing me out, like passionately cursing me out, calling me bald head, Kojak, MF this, that, whatever like that,” Medina told the commission. When Medina asked others in authority if he had any ability as a monitor to respond, he was told “basically they can do anything to you, we can’t do nothing to them. “
“The only policy that we knew offhand was that if you see anything or when anybody says something you report it straight to the security specialist,” Medina said.
“Because I can’t search kids. I can’t touch kids. I can’t chase kids. I can’t stop fights,” Medina claimed.
“You grab a kid in Parkland. I’m getting email from a parent in Parkland and they’re, I’m either going to get fired … or I’m going to get reprimanded for grabbing this kid.”
His view of his job is telling in hindsight, given that he did not chase, confront or search Nikolas Cruz when he first spotted him.
“I was too far away. I couldn’t go run and catch him. I couldn’t chase him. I’m not Superman to be able to fly over the gates,” he said in the deposition.
In his statements, Medina also seemed to be concerned about protecting himself.
He told the commission, in an interview in September, that he learned on the job that if kids were fighting, don’t insert yourself.
“Don’t get caught up in the fight. You don’t want to get hit. You don’t want to get trampled,” he testified.
He recalled that the campus had a problem with kids casually skipping class and running in and out of buildings and on and off campus, without permission.
UberEats, the delivery service, would come, he said, and kids “would run out, grab the food, run back in, have their friend open the door.”
Medina was assigned to watch the gates at the front of the school, and he said he tried to control the problem. But kids just found another unmanned gate instead.
The students didn’t fear too many consequences because of their privileged upbringing and parents’ influence, he contended.
Stoneman Douglas takes in students from the middle-class community of Coral Springs and from Parkland, a well-to-do enclave of mostly highly educated professionals. The median household income in Parkland is $131,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
“They ain’t got no shame, man,” Medina said, recalling their students’ attitude if challenged. “Oh don’t worry. I can call my dad. I’ll be fine.”
He said the security team met on occasion if a parent complained about some problem such as bullying or a crowd of kids hanging out. But he said meetings run by Assistant Principal Winfred Porter were very casual.
“When Porter would come in for his meeting he will come in eating, come in eating, oh, yeah, you guys are doing a great job, you doing a great job, everything, just got to stay there, make sure you guys are out when class changes and we’ll talk to you guys later. That was it. … man, there would be stuff going on and we’d find out the — either seconds before or the day of. Like it’s — it was very laid back, very country club.”
Even after the massacre, when the Miami Heat’s Dwayne Wade showed up on campus, the administrators “didn’t tell nobody” beforehand, Medina said.
“It was chaos,” he said. “Chaos. The cafeteria, they broke tables in the cafeteria. The kids just went crazy. They didn’t tell anybody. They didn’t tell no security guards he was coming. They didn’t say anything.”
“Let it ride”
Some families of the dead argue that Medina never should have been working at Stoneman Douglas on the day of the massacre.
He had gotten into trouble a year earlier — in February 2017 — when two teenage girls at Stoneman Douglas accused him of making inappropriate comments. He was accused of asking one out on a date and whispering to another one: “You are fine as f—.”
That girl was Meadow Pollack, who later died in the tragedy. She told investigators she changed her route to classes to avoid Medina.
But the school district still kept him on.
A district discipline committee recommended that he be fired. But another high-level committee decided otherwise and settled on a three-day suspension without pay because it was a legally defensible consequence, Human Resources Chief Craig Nichols said in a recent deposition.
“If we … shoot for the moon, terminate someone, and it goes through the courts and we spend a lot of time, money, effort and get overturned, which is, unfortunately, easy to have happen because it was … too much for what the issue was, then we’re back to square one,” Nichols explained.
Medina testified that he been reassigned while under investigation but returned to Stoneman Douglas in late 2017.
It was a few months before the massacre.
“So I got brought back into the school in November,” Medina told the commission, explaining he had a meeting with Porter and another assistant principal, Jeff Morford.
Morford “he told me to kind of just stay very low key, you know, with the incident that happened befohttps://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/education/fl-ne-broward-school-board-hard-corners-final-20190220-story.htmlre, they put me in a post inside the 1200 building. They said control that building. Just, you know, roam the halls and make sure nobody is out. They had a problem with kids vaping in the bathrooms and stuff. So they told me to keep an eye on the bathrooms, you know, try to stay a constant look.”
Medina said he warned his superiors that they needed more security because the school “is huge.”
Two sides of the 1200 building were unlocked for students to enter, and Medina said he told Porter and Security Specialist Kelvin Greenleaf: “We need to close these doors. There’s no way I can control both sides of this building and keep kids in the building if you got access to both sides … if I’m coming this way, a kid run out that way. If I come out this way, the kid runs out this way.”
Their response: “Just let it ride,” Medina said. “We’ll look into it. We’ll see what we can do..we’re trying to hire more guys. We’re trying to hire more people but the School Board’s got us tight and we can’t do anything.”
On the day of the shooting, Cruz entered one of the unlocked doors to the 1200 building.
Lisa Maxwell, executive director of a local association of school administrators, said she did not know if Medina advocated for more help but said generally speaking schools did not have enough security before the mass shooting.
She noted that some elementary schools had no school resource officer and others shared one.
“Budgets are stretched to the breaking point, there’s no doubt about it,” she said.
Sounds of shots
The commission concluded that there were no written district policies regarding Code Red and lockdown procedures — and no drills at Stoneman Douglas on how to carry one out. The district has since adopted a policy and drills are now held regularly.
Medina told the commission that around December 2017, Detective Al Butler of the district’s Special Investigation Unit gave a lecture to the staff on how to prevent and respond to an active shooter.
Before the presentation, teachers regularly kept their classroom doors propped open with string, door stoppers or garbage cans, Medina said.
After Butler’s presentation, the security monitors tried to do a better job ensuring that teachers did not prop open their doors.
“They made us go around kicking the garbage cans in,” he said.
Medina told the commission he was not familiar with the sound of gunfire. He said he’d never been to a gun range. And when he was growing up, he said, his mother “was super Catholic straight” and would not allow guns in the house.
Butler played the sounds of gunshots for the staff.
“We were all kind of shocked with all that Butler was saying,” Medina said “because he was just so raw, you know. … I was like wow, you know, like how can you just, you know, you talking about … guys shooting up. … We were actually like, man, this is all new.”
Medina claims in his deposition that Butler told the monitors not to call for a lockdown unless they actually saw a gun or heard gunshots.
A lawyer for the Pollack family, David Brill, said that is unlikely and “ridiculous.” A copy of Butler’s PowerPoint published by the commission shows no such advice. Butler did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
If he called a Code Red every time he saw a kid running into a building — without seeing a gun — Medina told the commission he’d be calling a Code Red “four or five times a day.”
“We’ve been doing this training at the school, you know,” he told a detective the day of the shooting, explaining why he didn’t call for a lockdown after seeing Cruz enter the campus. “Don’t yell it unless you, you actually get a good visual because you go code black, they shut the whole — you get a million — all those cops out there for nothing. Then I don’t want to be the guy who calls that, you know.”
In the recent deposition, Brill asked Medina if he was concerned that he would be fired if he called a Code Red and was wrong.
“Yes,” Medina said, “because I have to take care of my family. I’m — I’m the only breadwinner in my house. My wife passed away five years ago.”
Instead, Medina radioed to another monitor inside the building to be on the lookout for a suspicious person. He told detectives he didn’t recall Cruz’s name but had recognized him as “Crazy Boy,” a former student who drew swastikas on his backpack and wore camouflage masks to scare other students.
Some of the monitors had privately joked a year earlier that if anyone were to shoot up a school it would be Cruz, he recalled.
“Something told me don’t want to approach him, you know. Like, I don’t know if — I don’t know if he had a handgun,” Medina said at the time. “Maybe he could have had a handgun in a pocket. And if that gate wasn’t open, I’m the first one dead because I’m, I’m out front.”
momatz@sunsentinel.com, 954-356-4518