A stepdaughter of the sheriff’s deputy who stood outside for four minutes during the six-minute Parkland, Florida shooting has spoken out against him, saying that she feels he is a “coward.”
Speaking to reporters, 23-year-old Sarah De Luca, whose stepfather is 54-year-old Scot Peterson, criticized the former deputy for not taking action during the tragic school shooting on Feb. 14.
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“Both of their guns shoot bullets, he didn’t have a water gun,” De Luca said. “He’s a giant, he’s 6ft 4in. I feel like the shooter would have been scared of Scot in his uniform running towards him. I do feel Scot is a coward.”
“If he was too soft to do something, he shouldn’t have signed up to be a cop. I’d be pretty upset if I was a parent,” she added, according to the Daily Mail.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Peterson resigned from his position as a school resource officer after is was discovered that he waited outside of a building for four minutes of the six-minute gunfire.
Following Peterson’s resignation, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told reporters, “I am devastated. Sick to my stomach. He never went in.”
Not long after Sheriff Israel’s comments, U.S. President Donald Trump commented.
“He’s trained his whole life… but when it came time to get in there and do something, he didn’t have the courage or something happened. He certainly did a poor job, there’s no question about that. That’s a case where somebody was outside, they’re trained, they didn’t react properly under pressure or they were a coward,” Trump said.
As has been widely reported, on Valentine’s Day, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and opened fire, killing 17 students and teachers. Cruz was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder, one for each of the people he confessed to killing.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office has been heavily criticized lately over their alleged handling of Cruz prior to the shooting, as it was reported that they received numerous calls about him in the past.
On Feb. 27, the law enforcement agency announced in a tweet that they had arrested a teenager after receiving word that he may be planning to set off a homemade explosive device.
Some took to blasting the department over their actions, effectively dragging them on Twitter for their “better late than never” pipe bomb arrest.
So are u guys now answering your phone and following up on reports? Was there an internal review or something? Or were officers from literally any other county on duty?
— Glutton4Pnshmnt (@Glutton4Pnshmnt) February 27, 2018
“Better late than never! Tell your Sheriff to resign,” one person said, while another quipped, “Now you see what happens when you do your job.”
Acknowledging that multiple calls were made to the department related to Cruz, one user tweeted, “Wow, you must have had 50 calls about him. Is that the magic number? 50. If 3 more calls would’ve come in, 17 people would be alive? What a policy.”
