On Friday, a police officer who entered the high school during the 2018 Parkland shooting testified that a sheriff’s deputy outside had established that the gunman was in an upper floor.
Scot Peterson, a former Broward County deputy, is on trial for not confronting the gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were slain. Since his interview with police two days after the tragedy, he has maintained his story that he heard gunfire but couldn’t determine if it was inside or outside.
Coral Springs police officer Richard Best testified on the third day of the trial, according to a WPLG-TV report, on what Peterson allegedly told him outside the school.
“I asked my sibling, ‘What do we have?'” Telled the jury that best. “Gunshots,” he said, “on the second or third floor.”
If convicted, Peterson, 60, faces a possible life term in jail.
“The more time that passes, the more damage that is done,” Best added. To paraphrase, “Every time you heard a gunshot, somebody might be dead.”
Peterson is accused of not stopping Nikolas Cruz before he killed six people on the building’s third story. The deputy was not involved in the 11 killings that occurred on the building’s first level before he arrived.
In the 73 seconds it took Cruz to reach the third level, Peterson had already entered the building, pistol drawn. Peterson drew his weapon and hid in a nook of a building 23 meters away. After the firing had ceased for around 35 minutes, he didn’t move from his position for another 40.
Student Arman Borghei, who was on the third story of the building at the time of the shootings, has said that he saw Peterson, pistol drawn, standing outside the building.
Borghei claimed to have been “really scared, wondering when help would arrive,” however he never saw Peterson enter the premises.
