Late Response

Security Camera’s Tape-Delay May Have Let Florida Shooter Escape the School

Police thought 20-minute-old images were live.

The police response to the Florida school shooter was delayed because officers thought the security-camera images they were watching were live—but they were nearly half an hour old. The Sun-Sentinel reported that 26 minutes after Nikolas Cruz put down his rifle and fled Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, police were still watching images of him inside the building, believing it was showing his real-time location. An officer was heard via a radio transmission at 2:56 p.m. saying Cruz was on the second floor of the school but the local sheriff’s official report says he left the school at 2:28 p.m., seven minutes after he began shooting at his schoolmates. Cruz was eventually apprehended more than an hour later. Coral Springs Police Chief Tony Pustizzi said the images were “delayed 20 minutes and nobody told us that.” He denied it hampered efforts to rescue students but admitted that the confusion “made it harder to identify where the guy was.”