PARKLAND, Fla. — Marjory Stoneman Douglas High has fences, gates and emergency procedures to keep students safe, but a determined gunman found a way around them.
He came when he knew the gates would be open and set off a fire alarm that would dismantle a safety system, officials say.
And the school resource officer, who is supposed to help protect students, may not have been on school grounds at the time.
Accused gunman Nikolas Cruz, who had been expelled from the school for behavioral problems, arrived on campus about 20 minutes before the school day ended.
“This particular individual came on to campus at the time of dismissal, and that is a very open time for campus,” Superintendent Robert Runcie said.
About 20 minutes or so before dismissal, school officials will usually open the gates around campus so that students and staff parked in various parking lots, as well as school buses and parents picking up their kids, can get out easily, said Jerry Graziose, the district’s former director of school safety.
“During the day, those areas locked. But when you’re getting ready for kids to leave, all the gates in the different areas have to be unlocked, and it takes a few minutes for the person doing that,” Graziose said.
Once a person gets onto campus, they have access to a number of classroom buildings, which are often unlocked so that students can easily get to their classes.
Graziose said a similar dilemma exists at the start of the school day, when large numbers of students are entering campus.
Once the shooting began, the school went into a procedure known as Code Red, where doors are automatically locked and students and staff are required to stay in their classroom. But the killer pulled the fire alarm, which will override a Code Red, said Lisa Maxwell, executive director of the Broward Principals and Assistants Association.
As a result, doors that would have otherwise remained shut were being opened by students, making it easier for the gunman to find victims, experts say.
Cruz shot victims in seven classrooms in Building 12, a three story building on the north side of campus, Broward Sheriff’s Office officials say.
Grazioze, who retired from the school district in 2015, said he recommended upgrades to fire alarm systems at Stoneman Douglas and other schools so that the entire school doesn’t have to evacuate when someone pulls an alarm. He said there have been numerous problems with kids pulling alarms as pranks, and he said there are systems out there that will first alert the office and give them up to 40 seconds to determine whether the emergency is real before sounding a school-wide alarm.
The only person trained and armed to fight back against an assailant is Stoneman Douglas’s one school resource officer, a Broward Sheriff’s deputy funded by the city of Parkland. But Maxwell said she doesn’t think he was on campus when the shooting happened.
“I have been told by a couple of sources that the SRO was either called off campus responding to something happening or it could have been his day off,” she said. “They are stretched very thin.”
Neither BSO nor school district officials responded to requests for comment about the whereabouts of the officer.
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