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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) – Florida sheriff's captain, who oversaw the initial response to the Parkland High School massacre in February, resigned Tuesday after the first shots were fired.
The Broward sheriff's office announced that Captain Jan Jordan had resigned and that Sergeant. Brian Miller has been put on suspended pay while waiting for an internal investigation. He was ordered to surrender his firearm, badge and car and not to perform law enforcement duties.
Jordan oversaw the city of Parkland on Feb. 14 when an armed man killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Law enforcement officers told investigators that she appeared to be in a state similar to that of a trance and that she was overwhelmed while she was trying to direct the initial reaction to l & # 39; attack.
Miller arrived at school while filming, but the video shows that he remained outside the parking lot long after the end of the massacre, even as other agents of the force had entered the building.
At the request of a state commission investigating the massacre, the sheriff's office had not immediately conducted its own investigation into the actions of its deputies. An investigator from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission last week gave an extremely critical report to Jordan and Miller.
Jordan has never ordered deputies to enter the three-story first-year building where the shooting took place, the report said. Although his radio frequently fails due to an overload of the system, his first transmission has ordered the creation of a perimeter around the school. She arrived at Stoneman Douglas about 10 minutes after the start of the shooting.
"Jan Jordan was submerged, she was submerged," Gregory Lees, deputy chief of the nearby police department in Coconut Creek, told investigators. He arrived at the command post shortly after the shooting. "I could see it, I tried to help him." Jordan was removed from his position as commander of Parkland in June.
Shots were still fired when Miller arrived at the school and parked on a road a few hundred yards from the freshman building, shows a video. The commissioners said that Miller should have taken command as first deputy, but instead he took position behind his patrol car and never called on the radio. He then stood up as officers from the nearby town of Coral Springs and later MPs passed him in the building.
"He heard gunshots and he did not move," said Sheriff Bob Gualtieri of Pinellas County, chairman of the commission.
Sheriff Scott Israel made no comment on Jordan's resignation but said, after reviewing the commission's report, that it was "prudent" to relieve Miller of his duties. Israel has also been strongly criticized by the murdered parents, who have called on Governor Rick Scott to suspend him. Scott refused.
The phone numbers of Jordan and Miller were not found. The Broward Deputies Association, which represents patrol officers like Miller, did not immediately respond to a call for comment on Tuesday.
Commission member Ryan Petty, whose 14-year-old daughter, Alaina, died as a result of the shooting, said Tuesday that in light of the commission's findings, "it was a Honorable thing for Captain Jordan to resign. He added that Israel had promised the commission last week to take swift action against MPs who had failed in the shooting. He is therefore delighted to see Miller suspended.
Now, he said, Israel should "follow the example of Captain Jordan" and resign. Scot Peterson, another Broward MP, was the long-time resource officer for Stoneman Douglas. He retired in February after the video showed him that he had arrived in the building about a minute after the shooting began, but had unsheathed his gun and had taken cover.
Petty said that he is still waiting for Broward School Superintendent Robert Runcie to follow the discipline that he had promised last week against any director of Stoneman Douglas who would not have taken the measures that imposed on the suspect, Nikolas Cruz, when he was in school.
A Commission investigator said last week that two students said they reported Cruz to a director in December 2016, after one of them said that Cruz had threatened to shoot him. school. They disagree whether they spoke to Director Ty Thompson or Deputy Director Jeff Morford, but agreed that the administrator had dismissed their concerns and blamed Cruz's behavior for autism. They said that the administrator had told them that Cruz would leave school soon. Cruz was removed from school three months later.
A mother of one of the teens said that she had talked to Thompson the next day, unhappy with her son's treatment. She told the investigators that Thompson had told her that if she did not like the way the school was run, she would have to withdraw her son.
Thompson and Morford told the investigators that the meetings never took place, but Gualtieri said that, apart from the disagreement on which the administrator was contacted, the stories of the boys and the mother were corroborative.
Cruz, 20, is charged with 17 counts of first degree murder and faces a death sentence. His lawyers said he would plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence.
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