Parkland Shooting: Officer Found Not Guilty of Neglect

Facts

• On Thursday, Scot Peterson, the former sheriff’s deputy who, as a school resource officer stayed outside during the 2018 killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was found not guilty of any charges related to his alleged lack of response to the mass school shooting.¹
• Prosecutors had claimed Peterson was the “caregiver” of the school’s students and had an obligation to protect them. Peterson, the first police officer to be charged with child neglect as a caregiver, faced decades in prison if he’d been convicted.²
• Peterson faced seven counts of felony child neglect and three counts of culpable negligence for the deaths of 10 victims, including eight students. He faced one charge of perjury for saying he didn’t see the students fleeing the building and only heard a few gunshots.³
• Students, teachers, and law enforcement officers testified during the trial, with a training supervisor saying Peterson didn’t follow protocols for confronting the shooter.⁴
• While Peterson didn’t testify, his lawyers brought witnesses who didn't think the shots were coming from the school’s 1.2K-classroom building.⁴
• Peterson, who was the only person other than the shooter with a gun at the school, was at the scene, prosecutors said, for more than four minutes of the nearly seven-minute shooting and failed to act, taking cover for 45 minutes instead of helping students.⁵

Sources: ¹BBC News, ²Sun Sentinel, ³NBC, ⁴Associated Press, and ⁵CNN.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by Hot Air. Peterson’s acquittal is a slap in the face to the still-grieving families who lost people in a massacre that Peterson could’ve stopped. This pitiful inaction and failure to do his job to protect the victims. Even worse, he lied about what he saw and heard and should have been convicted.
• Narrative B, as provided by Daily Business Review. No law enforcement officer has ever been considered a legal caregiver of a community’s children, and the charges against Peterson were completely inappropriate. His acquittal is a win for law enforcement. No one deserves nearly 100 years in prison for how Peterson acted at the scene of the crime.