U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Evidence of more incompetence and cowardice has been exposed from the Parkland school shooting. Seventeen students and staff were murdered on February 14, 2018, at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas School. I will not name the murderer.
You have probably read and remember the armed school resource officer, Deputy Scot Petterson, failed to confront the killer immediately. He did not run to the sound of the gunfire. Instead, he waited outside the school for others to come. Eventually, there were seven or eight deputies outside the school waiting. Officers from another jurisdiction showed up and immediately entered, but it was too late. All the killing was complete. The murderer had fled the scene.
Wikipedia says the murderer was carrying a “duffle bag” and a backpack. That is incorrect. The murderer was carrying a black rifle case, not a duffle bag.
It is a critical distinction, because Andrew Medina, a school security monitor, recognized the rifle case.
Andrew Medina stated the murderer was carrying a rifle bag, and he recognized it as such. He said this in a recorded interview, under oath, shortly after the shooting.
Link to interview video on Twitter
This is one of the most pathetic videos out of the Parkland school massacre.
Medina watched the Parkland killer get onto MSD’s campus with a rifle bag and he FLED. Never stopped him or called a code red.
He saw, he hid, and now 17 are dead. Kids died and Medina lied. #FIXIT pic.twitter.com/8B80MeSXbb
— Andrew Pollack (@AndrewPollackFL) December 3, 2018
He was the first person recorded to see the murderer enter campus. He stated that he had been previously briefed; that the murderer was the most likely student to “shoot up the school” and that he recognized him.
As soon as Cruz began walking “like on a mission” toward the building, Medina followed and began frantically texting fellow security guards. “We had a meeting about him last year and we said if there’s gonna be anybody whose gonna come to this school and shoot this school up, it’s going to be that kid,” Medina told detectives on the day of the Feb. 14 shooting.
Medina stated that when the murderer had been enrolled at the school, they were “always watching him”:
“Just crazy,” Medina recalled of Cruz during the teen’s time at Parkland. “And we always was [sic] watching him, you know. Like, it was one of those kids that we always kept an eye on.”
What was the point of being briefed on the threat, recognizing him, and then doing nothing to stop him?
Medina called another unarmed security monitor. That monitor hid in a closet during the shooting. This lack of action is an obvious point of failure of the system. If Medina had confronted the murderer, he might have been able to stop him from entering the school. At the minimum, he would have disrupted the murderer’s plan and created a delay until armed police.
Medina recognized him as a threat. He realized he was carrying a rifle case. The murderer was forbidden from being on the school campus. A rifle in a rifle case is not an immediate threat until it is removed from the case. The murderer did not appear to be armed with other weapons. Medina did nothing to stop him. He never shouted at him or called for him to stop.
Medina is said, after the shooting started or a minute after the murderer entered the school, to have driven to the front of the school (on his utility vehicle) to get Scot Peterson, the armed school resource officer, and Sheriff’s deputy. Medina said he took Peterson back to where the murderer entered the school.
That is where Peterson stayed, calling backup, and waiting.
There were many opportunities to stop or reduce the carnage the Parkland school shooting.
Activist school officials worked with the sheriff’s office to ensure that minority students, such as the murderer, were not arrested, to prevent them from having a criminal record. The program was heralded a great success by the Obama administration. That program was used to shield the murderer from arrest.
The murderer was never committed as a danger to self and others, in spite of numerous incidents and problems. Therefore, he was never included as a prohibited possessor of firearms.
Andrew Medina, the unarmed school “security,” was placed in the security monitor position, as part of actions taken for discipline in a sexual harassment case. There appears to be a pattern here. The security program was not taken seriously by school officials. It seems to have been treated as a dumping ground for “problem” employees.
In government bureaucracy, it is challenging to get rid of incompetent people, especially if they are in one of the affirmative action protected groups. In places such as Democrat-controlled school districts, those groups contain most of the people in the bureaucracy. Only straight, white, non-Hispanic, men are outside of some special protected status.
When firing people is extremely difficult, managers find places to put incompetents where they can do the least damage. It appears that “school security” was such a place in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school bureaucracy. In high-stress situations, people fall to the level of their training. They seldom react better than their training.
What was Andrew Medina trained to do? It appears he was instructed to watch.
Watch gates, watch students. He was very reluctant to sound a warning. He knew how expensive sounding false alarms were. I suspect Andrew Medina did what he had been trained to do, which was to watch and report to others.
He had an excellent opportunity to stop a tragedy. He recognized the danger. He understood the potential of the rifle case. He did not act. He watched. He called others. It appears he was a problem. It may be the school management did not want him to interact with others.
Andrew Medina has faults. He has responsibility for some of the blame in the horrific mass murder that followed his failure to act. Though most of the blame for his inaction lies with the administration that put him in his position, and the training or lack of training they gave him. In the long, long tradition of bureaucracies, the administrators will work very hard to keep from accepting any blame. They will work hard to shift the blame to others. It is a significant function of bureaucracies to shift blame from the bureaucracy to other people.
Gun owners, Second Amendment Supporters and the NRA are favorite targets of the blame shifting. It fits the narrative Progressives sell: individuals are not responsible for their actions, society is.
But none of the restrictions called for on gun owners, Second Amendment supporters, or the NRA would have stopped this mass murder.
Better training and a strong sense of individual responsibility could have stopped it, at multiple points. Andrew Medina’s recognition of the threat and lack of action is now a classic example of that failure.
About Dean Weingarten:
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He guided the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of constitutional carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and recently retired from the Department of Defense after a 30-year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.