First deputy at Florida school shooting disregarded training, investigator says

The first deputy on the scene of the deadly shooting at a Florida high school last month disregarded his training by failing to enter the school and confront the gunman, a senior sheriff's official said Thursday.

The officer, former Broward County sheriff's Deputy Scot Peterson, alerted dispatchers to the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Feb. 14 within two minutes of its being reported to 911, according to audio dispatches released by the sheriff's office on Thursday.

But instead of rushing into the school, where he was assigned as a resource officer, Peterson remained outside and began radioing orders for fellow deputies to seal off the roads and intersections around the campus.

Eleven minutes elapsed before sheriff's deputies and Coral Springs police officers finally entered the building, the dispatch audio indicates. By then, the suspected gunman, Nikolas Cruz, had already fled the scene.

Col. Jack Dale, head of the department's criminal investigations and internal affairs units, said Thursday that the audio dispatches make it clear that Peterson had disregarded the training deputies undergo for such situations.

"First, interrupt the shooter, and that is the primary mission of an active shooter response," Dale said in an interview with NBC Miami. "When an active shooter ceases, then those secondary responses become appropriate."

Related: Fight, flight or freeze? Officers rarely fail to confront threat, experts say

Complicating the initial response was that Broward sheriff's deputies and Coral Springs police use different radio channels, so "anything that occurred on the Coral Springs channel would not be able to heard by the deputies on the scene and vice versa,” Dale said.

Still, he said, "I don't know that any chaotic scene like this ever goes perfectly."

Peterson, 54 — whom President Donald Trump called a "coward" last month — was suspended without pay and soon resigned, the sheriff's office said a week after the shooting.

His attorney said at the time that Peterson "is confident that his actions on that day were appropriate under the circumstances" and that all of the evidence, taken as a whole, "will exonerate him of any sub-par performance."

A circuit grand jury this week formally indicted Cruz, 19, on 34 counts: 17 on first-degree murder for the 17 people who were killed and 17 on attempted first-degree murder for the 17 people who were injured. Cruz initially pleaded not guilty last month, but he withdrew the plea on Thursday and said he would "stand mute" on the charges.

His public defenders said in a court filing that Cruz's earlier plea was filed "prematurely" and that "having now been indicted by the Grand Jury, the Defendant Nikolas Cruz withdraws that filing and Stands Mute to the Charges."

Standing mute is different from pleading nolo contendere, or "no contest," which courts treat as the equivalent of a guilty plea.

Standard procedure when a defendant stands mute is for the judge to enter a not guilty plea on the defendant's behalf — allowing the defendant to enter no plea while reserving the right to contest the charges later at a trial.

The Broward County Public Defender's Office last month said Cruz would plead guilty and spare families the pain of a trial if prosecutors promise not to pursue the death penalty.