A school security monitor at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida who failed to stop shooter Nikolas Cruz before he killed 17 people in February has been accused of sexually harassing two female students at the school, one of whom died in the shooting.
Medina, who is also a baseball coach at the school, was investigated last year for harassing the students and was suspended for three days. A school district investigation states that Medina asked one student to visit her at her job after school and whispered to another: “You are fine as f—,” the Sun-Sentinel reports.
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One of the girls in question was Meadow Pollock, a student who had died in the shooting. Pollock’s brother Hunter Pollack and father, Andrew Pollack, said that they found out after Meadow’s death that her mother had complained to the school about Medina’s behavior.
“He would call her names like ‘gorgeous and sweetheart’ and just be a creep,” Hunter Pollack told BuzzFeed News. “And when her boyfriend confronted him about it, he threatened him, too.”
“Both students became so uncomfortable with Mr. Medina’s comments and actions, they sought out different routes to their classes in an attempt to avoid him,” Robert Spence, a detective with the district’s Special Investigative Unit, wrote in his report.
The report cited surveillance tape taken in February 2017 which showed Medina targeting one student in the hallway. The report states that the student said Medina asked to come by her job, causing her to become so upset she did not go to work that day.
“Mr. Medina told her that he would wait for her and because it was not at school, he could flirt with her,” the report said.
After the allegations against Medina were reviewed by the district’s Professional Standards Committee, probable cause was found to charge him with inappropriate conduct and an October report recommended his termination.
Craig Nichols, chief of human resources for the district, signed off on the decision to override the assessment and instead give Medina a much lighter punishment. The school district wrote in the report that one of the reasons for this was because Medina had denied the allegations against him.
“If this had been brought to my attention back then, he would have never been at the school” on the day of the shooting, Andrew Pollock told the Sun-Sentinel.
On February 14, Cruz arrived at the school while Medina, who was not armed, was on duty. After the shooting, Medina told investigators that he did not confront Cruz or call a “Code Red,” which would have triggered a school lockdown and brought police to the campus.
He said that he radioed to tell a fellow monitor about the “suspicious kid” headed his way, and that monitor hid in a closet. Medina and the second monitor have since been reassigned.
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