FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Two veteran police officers sat on opposite sides of the courtroom Wednesday, the first insisting he did everything he could, based on what he knew at the time, to prevent one of the worst tragedies in Broward County history, and the other telling a jury that the first officer failed.
Prosecutors rested their child neglect case against former Broward Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson Wednesday, calling to the stand one final witness — the deputy who arrested Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gunman Nikolas Cruz after the 2018 murders of 17 people. Another 17 were injured.
Det. John Curcio’s voice cracked as he weighed the actions of Peterson on Feb. 14, 2018, against what he said should have happened.
“The goal is to stop him from killing people,” Curcio said. “Anything to get those kids to safety.”
Peterson was the school resource officer at Stoneman Douglas, armed and on duty the day of the shooting. When he heard there were noises coming from the area of the 1200 building, he headed there with a campus monitor who let him off a golf cart on the east side of the building.
Inside the building, as Peterson arrived, the gunman fired two shots into football coach Aaron Feis. Feis and Peterson were on opposite sides of the building, Peterson at the east entrance with the door closed, Feis gunned down at the west entrance with the door open.
Defense lawyer Mark Eiglarsh has argued that from his vantage point, Peterson would not have known the shots were coming from inside the building. The noise from the gun would have echoed off three nearby buildings. Peterson, Eiglarsh said in opening statements earlier this month, did what he was trained to do: He took cover and got on his police radio.
Prosecutors say Peterson would not be in trouble if he had opened the door to the east entrance. He would have seen the chaos on the first floor, the dust falling from the ceiling, the dead and wounded in the hallway, the shattered glass on the floor. He might have thought to head upstairs, to find the gunman. Had he done that, Cruz could have been interrupted, maybe even stopped.
After interviewing Peterson as part of the investigation, Curcio said he came to the conclusion that Peterson failed to follow his training by running from the sound of gunfire instead of towards it.
“You try to determine where the shots are coming from,” Curcio said.
Under cross-examination, Curcio conceded that taking cover is the appropriate action for an officer when he thinks he’s being fired upon. But he criticized Peterson for staying put while 60 shots were fired on the third floor, and for going on the radio to tell others to stay away from the building.
“They were given the wrong direction,” Curcio said.
While Peterson has yet to take the stand, and is not legally required to do so, his lawyer has said in court that Peterson was trying to keep bystanders safe from what he believed to be one or more snipers. A handful of police witnesses said last week that they could not assume there was only one shooter until much later.
Broward Circuit Judge Martin Fein rejected a defense motion to dismiss the case at its halfway point, a routine ruling on a routine motion, but he did appear to be leaning toward the defense argument that prosecutors never proved Peterson knew with certainty shots were coming from inside the building.
Still, Fein said it remains a question for the jury to decide.
The defense expects its part of the case to last a week.
Peterson is charged with child neglect with great bodily harm, culpable negligence and perjury. To find him guilty of child neglect, the jury would have to find Peterson was a caregiver under Florida law.
No Florida police officer has been charged under that statute.
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