‘Coward cop’ Scot Peterson who hid as Nikolas Cruz killed 17 insists he did a good job

The Parkland school officer who was seen on surveillance video hiding as Nikolas Cruz opened fire in students inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is breaking his silence.

Scot Peterson tells The Washington Post that after one of the school security guards radioed in to him after hearing gunfire he thought it was just a childish prank.

‘Probably a few kids acting like idiots,’ remembers Peterson, who had been told by the guard it sounded like a ‘possible firecracker.’

Peterson admits however that when he got closer to the building where Cruz was he immediately realized it was not firecrackers, but gunfire.

He still maintains though that despite not going into the building, he did everything he could at the time. 

‘How can they keep saying I did nothing? I’m getting on the radio to call in the shooting,’ says Peterson.

‘I’m locking down the school. I’m clearing kids out of the courtyard. They have the video and the call logs. The evidence is sitting right there.’

Coward cop: Scot Peterson is breaking his silence in an interview with The Washington Post, four months after he failed to engage school shooter Nikolas Cruz

Peterson will also be speaking on Today this week, and on Monday the NBC morning show previewed that interview, in which he could be seen bumbling when asked to explain why he did not go in the school. 

‘I’m human…in the perfect world, oh, I would have said, “Oh, yeah, I know there was a shooter in there. Let me go to the third floor. Find this person,”‘ says Peterson.

‘You know…at that point if I would have known, I mean, knowing what I know today, I would have been in that building in a heartbeat, I mean, like I said, it was my kids….I didn’t know…I wrack my brain. I go, “Why?”‘ 

By the time the first gunshot victim was discovered, six minutes after that report of firecrackers, the massacre was over.

Peterson tells the Post that when he saw his girlfriend Lynda Rodriguez that day he said: ‘I couldn’t get him. It was my job, and I didn’t find him.’

He did not enter the building however to even try and locate Cruz, saying that he had been trying to search for the gunman for most of the massacre and did not near Cruz’s location until the end of his deadly rampage.

‘I was trying to figure it out,’ explains Peterson.

‘I was scanning for the shooter, looking over the windows, the sidewalk, the rooftop. I thought maybe it was a sniper like in Las Vegas. I just didn’t know.’

 



Read more at DailyMail.co.uk