The Florida sheriff’s deputy who resigned in disgrace after doing nothing during last week’s massacre is seen in a 2015 video touting the crime prevention skills of school resource officers — like himself.
Scot Peterson stood by an entrance to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for more than four minutes after the shooting started, but “he never went in,” Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told reporters.
The deputy was suspended without pay pending an investigation, then resigned. When asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said he should have “went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer.”
But in 2015, Peterson urged Broward County schools to keep the jobs of school resource officers, who were provided lodging in trailers as part of their perks.
“These colleagues work hard. We are crime prevention, an audit report will never show how much we prevent,” he said in response to a county official who cited an audit that discredited the program’s value, according to the Sun Sentinel.
Video of a February 2015 meeting posted by Broward County shows Peterson making his plea to the school board.
“I’ve been a police officer for 30 years and I’ve been a school resource officer for 25 years. Go Eagles, by the way,” Peterson said during his introduction to the board, referring to the school mascot. “It’s a crime prevention program.”
He mentioned incidents at Atlantic Terminal College in Coconut Creek, where he lived since 2000, and described receiving a call about an alarm in the school’s cafeteria.
“And right there I knew, because I’ve been at that school for many years, I knew right when I heard the cafeteria, you know when you get the hairs on the back of your neck going up, I said, ‘That never goes off,’” he said.
“So I ran into my trailer, I grabbed my firearm and my ID and my shorts and my sneakers and I ran over to the cafeteria. As I got to the cafeteria, sure enough, there were four males inside the cafeteria,” he continued.
“They saw me peeking through the glass, they obviously fled. I chased them, I’m getting older, but I started chasing them, I identified who I was and as ironic as it may seem, they ran right towards my trailer.
“So they ran past, jumped over the fence, I jumped into my car, I apprehended two of them … threw them in the back, kept going, grabbed the other two,” he said.
He also described another “chilling” incident when he heard banging on the front door and a woman yelling that there was an armed man wearing a ski mask.
“So I ran, put some shorts on, ran out with my firearm, while I’m running to the school, I’m contacting Coconut Creek police, we set up a perimeter,” he said.
“Long story short, we caught the individual when he ran across the Coconut Creek Parkway and he was hiding near a bank.”
It turned out the miscreant was just an 18-year-old senior brandishing a paintball gun.
Meanwhile, several Palm Beach County cops have been stationed outside the former deputy’s Boynton Beach home, according to WSVN.
When a reporter from the station tried to approach Peterson’s home for an interview Thursday, he said, he encountered a phalanx of six officers standing guard.
“They prevented us from approaching the house,” Frank Guzman tweeted.
Although Peterson was “distraught” about the shooting that killed 17 people, he believed he performed his duty, Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association head Jim Bell said Thursday.
“He believed he did a good job calling in the location, setting up the perimeter and calling in the description (of suspect Nikolas Cruz),” Bell said.
With Post wires