MIAMI.- A recreation of the massacre that occurred in 2018 at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people died, will take place this Friday at the same school center in compliance with a civil lawsuit five parents of shooting victims.
A bipartisan congressional delegation will visit the building this Friday before the reenactment.
In a motion recently filed in a Broward County court, the plaintiffs asked for “permission to recreate” the events that occurred at the cited school, where Nikolas Cruz, then 19, entered and killed 14 students and 3 with a semiautomatic rifle. staff members.
The purpose is to document the “movements and actions” of the former head of security at the institute, officer Scot Peterson, outside the building where the event that claimed the lives of 14 students and three teachers took place.
The plaintiffs, Meadow Pollack, Luke Thomas Hoyer, Alaina Petty, Madeline “Maddy” Wilford and Alex Schachter, asked that the shooting be allowed to be reenacted before the building where their children were killed is demolished.
The Florida judge who approved the motion last July wants the reenactment to take place before the start of the school year.
The motion states that “none of the previous inspections is comparable to the weight and precision that this proposed recreation will provide”, to then specify that, despite the fact that the plaintiffs have ample evidence that Peterson heard more than 70 shots and knew of where they came from,” this evidence “cannot be duplicated.
For its part, the aforementioned school published a notice stating that, “as part of a civil case, a judge authorized a recreation of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, 2018.” “Recreation is a court order and is not organized or controlled by Broward County Public Schools,” she says.
“District and school leadership understand how difficult this event will be for our school families,” the notice added.
The intent of the parents of four of the victims is to prove that Peterson heard more than 70 shots and did not act during the shooting.
Peterson, who had been accused in court of doing nothing to stop the killing, was found not guilty in late June of the charges against him.
After four days of deliberations, the jury cleared Peterson, 60, of the 11 charges against him, including “child neglect and culpable negligence”, for allegedly his null action to prevent the massacre perpetrated at the aforementioned school. high school, as argued by the State Attorney’s Office.
The reenactment, which will be videotaped, will parallel the shooter’s movements inside the building.
Tony Montalto, father of one of the victims of the shooting and who promotes the Stand with Parkland platform, today thanked various congressmen on social networks for supporting the bipartisan ALYSSA (Alert Systems) Act, recently approved to provide greater security to schools.
The bipartisan law will require silent panic alarms in all schools to immediately alert law enforcement to an active shooter situation.
According to recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics, only 40% of schools report using silent alarms that are directly connected to local police.
Last February marked the fifth anniversary of the shooting perpetrated by Cruz, who on the same day of the massacre confessed to the police that he had been the perpetrator and later pleaded guilty in court to all charges and apologized.
Cruz was spared a death sentence because there was no unanimous jury, a requirement that is no longer necessary in Florida, under a new law promoted by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
