FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Former Broward Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, the school resource officer accused of failing the children in his care by running from the building instead of confronting the Parkland mass shooter in 2018, was found not guilty on all charges Thursday.
After the first not guilty verdict was read, Peterson placed his head on the table and sobbed while being consoled by his attorney Mark Eiglarsh. Peterson’s wife, Lydia Rodriguez, also wept in the courtroom gallery.
“I got my life back after 4 1/2 years,” a relieved Peterson said outside the courtroom. “It’s been an emotional roller coaster for so long.”
Friends and family members embraced Peterson and his lawyer, who saw the verdict as a vindication not only of Peterson’s actions that day, but of the defendant’s decision not to take the stand during his trial.
Peterson, 60, was charged with six counts of child neglect with great harm, one count of child neglect without great harm, three counts of culpable negligence and one count of perjury for allegedly downplaying the number of shots he heard in order to minimize his failure to act.
Ever since the shooting, Peterson had been painted alternately as a coward and a scapegoat, an emblem of the system’s failure to protect the 17 murdered and 17 wounded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and a representative of the confusion that reigned on campus while the shooting was taking place.
Prosecutors contrasted his decision to run from the east entrance of the building, armed and trained to deal with mass shootings, with the decision made by unarmed football coach Aaron Feis, who was told shots were coming from the 1200 building and raced to the west entrance.
Feis never made it inside the building. He was shot to death after he opened the door.
Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor in a prepared statement said the case was one-of-a-kind in the nation’s history and countered those who have made Peterson’s case a “political” debate.
“Scot Peterson’s inaction and the misinformation he provided to law enforcement officers had a dire impact on the children and adults who died or were injured on the third floor of the 1200 Building,” Pryor wrote. “He stood by, leaving an unrestricted killer to spend 4 minutes and 15 seconds wandering the halls at leisure — firing close to 70 rounds and killing or injuring ten of the 34 children and educators who bore the brunt of the massacre. The evidence showed he stood in one safe spot for more than 40 minutes while the victims on the third floor were killed and injured and while other law enforcement officers took action.”
The case was closely watched — Peterson is the only person other than gunman Nikolas Cruz charged in the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting. He is also the first law enforcement officer charged with child neglect as a “caregiver,” a role that legally applies to parents, babysitters, teachers and even a kidnapper in one unusual case.
Police officers have not been listed among caregivers, but Peterson was not a first responder summoned to the scene to deal with the unfolding crisis. Prosecutors say he was a caregiver because he was the school resource officer assigned specifically to protect the students of the Parkland high school.
“We are extremely pleased with the outcome today,” defense attorney Eiglarsh said. “It’s not just a victory for Scot, but it’s a victory for every law enforcement officer in the country. How dare prosecutors try to second-guess the actions of honorable, decent police officers?
“It’s extremely important to remember how we got here … former Sheriff Scott Israel held a press conference without ever speaking to my client,” Eiglarsh said about how Israel portrayed Peterson’s role on campus. Because of Israel’s “reckless, selfish, political actions, (Peterson) had to endure four years of heartache and misery.”
But “jurors made it clear from their verdict … the system works,” Eiglarsh said. “If you’re falsely accused, the system works and they will eventually get it right.”
After the trial ended, Peterson said, “it was a massacre on Feb. 14, and the only person to blame is that monster,” referring to Cruz, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Cruz pleaded guilty in 2021 and was tried last year in front of a jury tasked with deciding whether he should be executed for the crimes. From jury selection to verdict, the trial lasted 61/2 months. Family members were disappointed when the jury failed to reach unanimous agreement to impose death, sparing the gunman’s life.
And the Peterson verdict left a bitter taste in the mouths of Parkland victims’ families and others connected to the high school and the community.
“The good guy with the gun didn’t do his job,” U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Stoneman Douglas alum, said in a tweet. “He failed. Kids died. The message this sends to parents around the country is if the people you depend on to keep your kid safe fail, nothing happens.”
Tony Montalto, father of Gina, 14, who was killed that day, was in the courtroom for the verdict. “We still feel he should be haunted every day by his failure to act,” Montalto said. And to the jurors: “I think your school should hire him to protect your children.”
Lori Alhadeff, whose 14-year-old daughter Alyssa was one of the victims, has dedicated the years since her daughter’s murder to making schools safer by the work of a nonprofit called Make Our Schools Safe, joining the Broward School Board and calling on lawmakers across the country to pass Alyssa’s Law in honor of her daughter, which requires all public and charter schools to have an alert system linked directly to law enforcement.
“I’m completely disappointed,” Alhadeff said by phone after the verdict Thursday. “Today the jurors actually made schools less safer … They could have set a precedent today… Unfortunately that didn’t occur today and so school resources officers might now be thinking twice before they go in to take down a shooter in school. So I’m completely disappointed.”
Max Schachter, whose son Alex, 14, died, simply said, “It’s not right.”
The shots that killed Feis were the first that Peterson heard, and according to his lawyer, he could not tell whether those shots came from inside the building or outside.
The sound of gunfire echoing off nearby buildings created confusion among other responding officers and witnesses, some of whom appeared to believe the shots came from as far away as the football field on the other side of the campus.
Prosecutors say if Peterson had run into the building, he would have seen the chaos on the first floor and been in a better position to find and confront, engage or distract the shooter. While it’s impossible to speculate about what would have happened, the allegations of neglect came, according to prosecutors, because he didn’t even try.
Fred Guttenberg, who lost his 14-year-old daughter Jaime in the shooting, noted that she was literally one step away from safety when she was gunned down on the third floor.
“‘I get my life back.’ That’s what he said,” said Guttenberg, who returned to South Florida from a vacation in Greece one hour before the verdict was read. “My daughter needed one second. If he did anything that day, she has that second, and my daughter lives today. He gets his life back. My daughter’s is forever gone.”
Peterson has also been named in numerous lawsuits filed by the families of the victims and chastised publicly by everyone from former Sheriff Israel to former President Donald Trump, who all labeled him a coward who failed to do his job.
Peterson thanked the jury of three men and three women for seeing past those characterizations, which shaped the narrative about what he did for years. He and his attorney also rejected any comparison between his actions on Feb. 14, 2018, with those of the police officers in Uvalde, Texas, who failed to enter an elementary school to stop a gunman who was murdering students. In that case, Eiglarsh said, there was no mystery about where the shots were coming from and no confusion caused by police radios that weren’t working properly.
“I never want any law enforcement officer anywhere to go through what I went through last four years,” Peterson said.
If convicted, Peterson had faced the possibility of decades in prison, though such a sentence is unlikely for someone who spent 32 unblemished years as a law enforcement officer with no previous criminal record. He also faced the loss of his $104,000 annual pension.
Deliberations in his trial began late Monday and ran through Tuesday and Wednesday before resuming Thursday morning. The jury signaled just before 3 p.m. Thursday, after about 19 hours of deliberations, that they had reached their decision.
(Staff writer Kathy Laskowski contributed to this report.)
