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Parkland Deputy Told Cops to Stay Away During Shooting

Officers were reportedly told to “stay at least 500 feet away” from the building as the gunman shot students inside.

A Broward County sheriff’s deputy who resigned amid public outrage for failing to enter a Florida high school during a mass shooting last month reportedly told other police officers to stay out of the building as well. According to radio dispatches released Thursday, the deputy, Scott Peterson, reportedly told fellow officers to make sure “no one comes inside the school,” even as calls flooded into 911 call centers about the chaos inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed. Despite publicly claiming he believed the gunfire was coming from outside the school, Peterson can be heard in the radio dispatches saying the gunfire was inside the building, the Miami Herald reports. Nonetheless, he told officers to “stay at least 500 feet away at this point,” a command that a dispatcher then relayed to other police. It wasn’t until 11 minutes after the shooting began that officers finally entered the building, a fact that has brought new scrutiny to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office’s handling of the massacre, which is already under review by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.