Could Scot Peterson Have Stopped the Parkland Shooting?

The day 17 people were shot to death inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the only armed officer on the property stood outside, apparently doing nothing. He can explain, and he does—at length. Is he trying to convince the victims’ parents? The survivors? Other cops? Or himself?

TO GET TO THE CABIN WHERE HE LIVES , you turn off the main road onto a dirt path, two tire tracks running through old-growth forest. The road dips, then forks right, up an embankment. Eventually you arrive at the foot of his gravel driveway, where he's built a wooden shelter for the three bear-cub statues Lydia bought someplace, to protect them from the weather. A little project to keep him busy. There's a new split-rail fence leading up to the house—he put that in, too— and he's got an American flag in a bracket screwed into the trunk of a big oak.

The air is crisp and clean out here in the North Carolina woods, far away from any of the people who were there that day. And from the people who shouted in front of his home, made death threats against him, called him that stupid name, the coward of Broward. Called him much worse than that. The people who still don't understand, because they don't know the facts.

The truth is, no one understands. Well, Lydia does, of course, and it's part of why she's stuck with him all these years, even when she has to leave the bedroom in the middle of the night to cry so he can't hear her. She was a teacher at the school for a long time, so she knows there was no way he could’ve ever got to that boy. She knows Scot was right where he should have been the whole time.

It was not your time, she tells him. You did not go into that building, because the shots you heard were outside, and it was divine intervention. It was not your time.

He appears from behind the storm door. Blue jeans, wire-framed glasses, a cop's buzz cut. And immediately you see: It's really him. Scot Peterson, the cop from the surveillance video. Valentine's Day 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida. That same six-foot-five frame—a little huskier now, four years later, but the same lumbering figure. The whole world saw it: his grainy silhouette standing against a wall in the high school courtyard, behind the white pole. Not moving. Not appearing to do much of anything at all. When they showed it on the networks, they freeze-framed it and drew a circle around him, an armed officer just . . . standing there while those people were getting killed inside.

Here was the MSNBC analyst: "There does appear to be video of him, from a distance, leaning up against a wall, and clearly not going into the building. . . ."

He's 59. He mostly does projects around the house these days. Like the shelter for the bear-cub statues, and the outdoor kitchen he built around back. Expanded the front porch. Screened in the back deck. Anything, really, to keep his mind off the shooting and the people who think he's a coward, and the fact that this fall, he will face the possibility of a trial under an obscure Florida law that hinges on whether he was a caregiver. They’re trying to say he was a caregiver for the more than 3,200 students at Stoneman Douglas, and if they can prove he was—which is a long shot, but still—then he could be charged with felony child neglect and could go to prison for a very long time.

Inside the cabin, there are photos of his own children. "My two boys, both were in the military," Peterson says. "Well, one's still in the military, in the Air Force. And my youngest son, he just finished the Navy. Matter of fact, he's in Texas now. He did his tour and he's now in Texas. I have my oldest daughter, she's in nursing. She lives in Florida. And my second, she's living with Mom. She's graduated from FIU and still trying to get her feet wet."

He sits by the fireplace. It was wood burning when they bought the house, but he’d never had one of those in his life, not in Florida. Monkeying with burning wood? Bullshit. So they converted it to gas, and Peterson built a fence to hide the propane tank outside.

"I’m going to be honest here: What's going on with me? I don't burden my kids with it. They’re starting on their own lives," he says.

He shifts his weight in the recliner, one of two facing the TV. "I know at the end of the day I have to believe in justice, because I didn't do anything wrong that day at all," he says, as if there is nothing else to say. "I sleep at night because I know that. So I believe in the rule of law; I believe in justice. I believe when the facts of what occurred actually come out—"

He cuts himself off, stiffens, locks his eyes on you, then starts anew: "The families that lost their kids, they’ve never been told the truth of what happened at that shooting."

HERE ’ S WHAT happened, based largely on a 439-page report by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, a group of 19 state officials and investigators: At 2:19 p.m. on February 14, 2018, an Uber dropped off Nikolas Cruz, 19, on Pine Island Road just outside his former high school. He wore black pants, a dark hat, and a burgundy JROTC shirt in the colors of Stoneman Douglas. He carried a large bag containing his AR-15 rifle and several loaded magazines.

Cruz walked through a gate that was supposed to be locked while school was in session. Andrew Medina, an unarmed campus security monitor, spotted him. As Cruz jogged toward the east side of the three-story 1200 Building, Medina radioed on a school channel to another campus monitor, David Taylor, already inside, that there was a "suspicious kid" heading his direction.

Taylor saw Cruz enter at the far end of a long hallway lined with ten classrooms, each with a window in its door. Cruz ducked into a nearby stairwell, and Taylor thought he might be heading for another floor, so Taylor took another set of stairs to try to intercept him.

Inside the eastern stairwell, Cruz took out the rifle, snapped in a large magazine, and put on a vest loaded with more easy-to-access ammunition. A freshman named Chris McKenna walked in on Cruz. "You better get out of here," McKenna said Cruz told him. "Something bad is about to happen." McKenna fled the building and found campus monitor and football coach Aaron Feis, who drove McKenna to a safer location in a golf cart and returned to the building.

At 2:21 p.m., Cruz reentered the hallway on the first floor. Seeing several students in the open corridor in front of him, he raised his semiautomatic weapon and fired a deafening spray of bullets that struck and killed 14-year-old Martin Duque Anguiano, 14-year-old Gina Montalto, and 15-year-old Luke Hoyer. Another bullet hit 15-year-old Ashley Baez in her left thigh, and she took cover in the doorway of a women's restroom.

Cruz turned and shot through the window of a classroom on his right, shattering the glass and striking several more students. Ashley Baez sprinted across the hall to take cover in a classroom at the far end of the building. Cruz proceeded to a classroom on his left and unleashed another rapid-fire attack on six more students, killing 17-year-old Nicholas Dworet and 17-year-old Helena Ramsay. Cruz didn't need to enter these classrooms at all—his high-velocity weapon could shoot quickly through the windows.

Dressed in his snug green uniform with yellow badging, sidearm on his hip, Peterson was outside the administration building, a couple buildings southeast of the 1200 Building. He ran into Kelvin Greenleaf, the supervisor of the school's security monitors, who acted as unarmed safety patrol for the school. Both had overheard a radio call from Medina about "strange sounds" coming from the 1200 Building. As they were hurrying to investigate, Medina pulled up in a golf cart, and Peterson and Greenleaf jumped in.

While students on the first floor ducked against walls and behind desks, students on the second floor took cover. So did Taylor, the unarmed security monitor, who unlocked a second-floor storage room to hide inside.

Smoke from the gun, muzzle flashes, or dust in the air had triggered a building-wide fire alarm. On the third floor, that alarm may have muffled the sounds of gunfire, and students poured into the hall; in some cases their classroom doors automatically locked behind them, a safety protocol.

Cruz headed back to the first classroom he’d shot into and unloaded another barrage of bullets on those inside. Five students in that first room were now injured, and three 14-year-olds—Alyssa Alhadeff, Alaina Petty, and Alexander Schachter—were fatally shot.

Chris Hixon, another campus monitor and the district's athletic director, had heard the noise and, although he was unarmed, ran toward the sound of the gunfire. Hixon threw open a set of double doors leading into the hallway on the west side of the building. Cruz turned and shot him. Hixon, bleeding, crawled behind a wall near the western stairwell.

As Cruz advanced down the hallway, he came to another untouched classroom full of kids on his right and opened fire there, killing 16-year-old Carmen Schentrup.

Outside, Peterson, Greenleaf, and Medina came into the view of a video camera stationed near the 1200 Building. Medina dropped Greenleaf and Peterson by the building's east door, and Peterson drew his weapon. Medina and Greenleaf were unarmed, and Peterson directed them to leave the area.

Back inside, Cruz headed for the stairs, leaving a few classrooms untouched. He passed Hixon and shot him again, this time fatally. On the opposite side of the building from Peterson, Feis, the football coach, had used an exterior door to gain access to the western stairwell at nearly the same time Cruz entered the first-floor landing. Feis came face to face with Cruz and was shot immediately.

Also at nearly the same time, Peterson radioed the Broward County Sheriff's Office for help. Peterson: "Be advised we have possible—uh, could be firecrackers. I think we have shots fired. Possible shots fired, 1200 Building."

Peterson then ran about 75 feet to take cover near the concrete vestibule of another building. He paced back and forth near a set of trees.

When Cruz reached the second floor, it looked abandoned. Students had heard the shots and hidden, so no one was visible through the classroom windows. As he walked east across the floor, some students heard him say, "No one is here," before firing into at least two classrooms and eventually taking the eastern stairwell to the third floor.

Peterson maintained his position outside.

He radioed again: "We’re talking about the 1200 Building. It's going to be the building off Holmberg Road."

Several teachers on the third floor may have sensed they were running out of time. Nearly two minutes after the fire alarm went off, as students clustered in the halls, they’d heard shots below them on the second floor. Teachers rushed to unlock classroom doors to get their students back inside. And the bathrooms on the west end of the hall had also been locked to discourage kids from vaping.

Cruz had spent almost a minute on the second floor. When he reached the third, there were about 20 people still in the corridor, and he opened fire, striking several kids and killing Scott Beigel, a geography teacher and cross-country coach, who was holding a classroom door open for students as they ran in.

Peterson maintained his position outside.

At the far end of the hall, a geography and history teacher named Ernest Rospierski flattened himself, along with several students, into the alcove of a locked classroom that was still a few rooms away from the western stairwell, which could be an escape. A moment later, as Cruz turned away to reach for another magazine in his vest, Rospierski moved to try another neighboring door—also locked.

As Cruz continued to reload his weapon, Rospierski saw his chance: He ran, directing the remaining students toward the nearby stairwell as Cruz finished reloading and began firing again. Rospierski and eight students would make it there safely, but Cruz killed 14-year-old Jaime Guttenberg and 15-year-old Peter Wang. Both were just a few feet from the safety of the stairwell.

Peterson maintained his position outside.

Cruz scanned the hall for survivors. Nearly 15 seconds later, he spotted 14-year-old Cara Loughran and 18-year-old Meadow Pollack, who had already been shot, huddled in the doorway of a classroom just two rooms away from the stairwell. He fired again, killing them.

By this point—six minutes since Cruz first walked through the gate—Broward County deputies were approaching the school and had begun radioing their status. Peterson repeated the suspected location: "We’re looking at the 1200 Building."

Seconds after that, Cruz noticed 17-year-old Joaquin Oliver cornered in the alcove of the locked men's restroom, just across the hall from that same stairwell. Cruz shot and killed him.

Peterson maintained his position outside.

Cruz tried to go down the stairwell, but the door wouldn't open. He didn't realize that Rospierski had stayed on the landing outside, near the lifeless body of a student, and found a way to block it, buying his kids more time to escape down the stairs, and past Feis's body at the bottom. Cruz spent the next couple minutes shooting up the teachers’ lounge before heading back to the western stairwell, abandoning his weapon and ammunition and exiting the building unopposed.

Peterson maintained his position outside.

Officers from neighboring Coral Springs began arriving at the 1200 Building at 2:29 p.m., just one minute after Cruz left the building. Peterson was still in his spot near the pole, and one of the officers took cover behind a nearby tree. That officer later said that at that moment, Peterson told him the shooter might be in the parking lot. A few minutes later, another Coral Springs officer, Richard Best, ran to Peterson's location and asked for more intel. Best said in his own statement that Peterson told him what he thought to be true then: Shots fired. The shooter is on the second or third floor.

He had been standing there for a total of ten minutes.

" DO YOU WANT to come to lunch?"

Peterson's been talking for a few hours now, and he's thinking of heading into town for a burger.

"No," says Lydia, who wears sweats and just finished eating a bowl of cereal at their dining-room table.

"You sure?" Peterson asks her.

"Yeah, I’m good," she says. "Trust me. That's a mental break for me."

"All right," he says. "See you in a bit."

"All right, dear. Enjoy."

He climbs into his SUV and starts down the dirt road and on toward the diner, a few miles away. Peterson used to ride motorcycles through these roads, and it always seemed peaceful. They’ve gotten to know the area these past couple years. They mostly stay around the house, but there's a LongHorn Steakhouse down in Blairsville, and they like the Mercier apple orchard over in Blue Ridge. They have season passes to Dollywood, the amusement park. Peterson plays pickleball in the summer.

He and Lydia have met some folks around here, neighbors mostly. People are nice, but they’re more polite than actually friendly. "That's one of the issues," he says. "And what I’ve learned about cops is, most of them, I think—how can I say it? I think their attitude is ‘I’m glad it's not me, and as long as it's not me, I’m going to just scurry away.’ I mean, I knew a lot of people, and I can count on one hand the people that ever even called me."

He looks out the side window, taps a thumb on the wheel.

"What do they say? You learn real quick who your friends are when the shit hits the fan."

He drives on, along a road that skirts the Hiwassee River, passing a gingerbread church and a historical museum with a bear statue out front.

"I look at the Sun Sentinel," he says, the newspaper of Broward County. "I always look at the headlines every morning, just to see what's going on. Yeah, otherwise— in a way it's sad, but it's the way it is."

He says he can't remember an exact moment when he wanted to be a cop. He just always thought it was an "honorable profession." He was the youngest of seven kids whose parents had emigrated from Germany and bought and managed a small apartment building in Bay Harbor Islands, north of Miami.

Peterson enlisted in the Army in 1983, hoping to join the military police. Instead, during basic training at Fort McClellan in Alabama, he caught double pneumonia, went home to recuperate, and ended up going to college instead of returning to the Army. Two years later, in 1985, he was 22 and finishing his criminal-justice degree when he applied to join the Broward County Sheriff's Office as a detention deputy at the county's main jail. Around 1988, Peterson spent a few years as a road patrolman and field-training officer before taking a newly created school-resource-officer position at a small adult vocational school. His job was to police the quiet campus and teach school officials ways to improve safety.

Peterson kept that post for the next two decades before joining Stoneman Douglas in 2009.

In 32 years on the job, he never discharged his weapon. "I’ve just heard it," he says, talking about gunfire.

At Stoneman Douglas, Peterson monitored 3,200 students across a 45-acre campus with grassy quads amid the buildings. He carried a gun and sometimes responded to two or three fights in a day, along with complaints about drugs or cyberbullying. "I always kept very, very busy. I probably made more arrests than any other Broward deputy," he says. (The sheriff's office was unable to confirm that statistic.)

One day after school, around 2014, a teacher named Lydia Rodriguez asked him to help jump-start her car's battery. It took him a few months before he asked her out—they went to Outback Steakhouse on their first date. He was going through his second divorce, with four kids from his first marriage and two stepkids from the second. Lydia, the daughter of Cuban immigrants, has a Brooklyn brogue and the demeanor of someone willing to brawl for the people close to her. She went to college in her 50s and started at Stoneman Douglas just a year after Peterson did. They dated, got serious, and eventually moved into a 55-plus community together; Lydia retired a couple months before the shooting. Their house shared a wall with the house next door.

A few days after the Parkland shooting, Peterson's commanding sergeant called. Cruz had been apprehended about an hour after the attack. Now President Donald Trump was coming to town to meet with victims’ families and shake the hands of first responders. Did Peterson want to meet the president?

"I said no. I lost 17 kids," he says. (Fourteen students, three adult staff.) "Seventeen kids got killed at my school. There's no need for me to shake hands with people when nothing good came out of that day."

" THE SHERIFF is throwing you under the bus," the text message read. Then there was another, and another, all saying the same thing— coworkers who were watching the news conference on TV. It was February 22, eight days after the shooting. Peterson was on his way home from a meeting at the sheriff's office, where, he says, he was brought into a room with a few higher-ups he’d never met before and informed that he was being given two options: He could resign or he could retire, keeping his full pension and benefits. He had turned his department vehicle over to the Broward County Sheriff's Office, and a lieutenant was driving him home. He didn't understand the text messages, so he called Lydia.

"You can't come home," she said. News trucks had parked up and down the street, and reporters were shouting questions through the windows.

Now the Broward County sheriff, Scott Israel, was standing at a podium in front of cameras from every local station and every major network in the country. He wore the same green uniform Peterson did. He spoke slowly. "In the case of Scot Peterson, our school resource deputy, I want to clarify any rumors," Israel said. "He was armed. He was in uniform. After seeing video, witness statements, and Scot Peterson's very own statement, I decided this morning to suspend Scot Peterson without pay pending an internal investigation." The sheriff said that instead of accepting a suspension, Peterson had "resigned and, slash, retired." The investigation, he said, would continue.

"What matters is that when we in law enforcement arrive at an active shooter, we go in and address the target. And that's what should have been done," Israel said. He said Peterson "clearly knew" there was a shooter inside. Israel said he was "devastated. Sick to my stomach."

Peterson asked the lieutenant to pull into a Walgreens. The world was spinning, as if in a feverish dream. He clutched his phone. What the hell is happening?

He called his neighbor Jim, who agreed to pick him up and sneak him into his house through their adjoining yards.

Thirty-two years with the sheriff's office. A record full of near-perfect performance reviews. And now here he was, having to call an old man to pick him up in a Walgreens parking lot so he could sneak in through the back door of his own home. A disgrace.

And then—and then—the next day, the president of the United States stood outside the White House and declared to reporters, and to the world, not only that Scot Peterson was a coward but that he had essentially failed at his life's work: "Deputy Sheriff Peterson, I guess his name is….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, but he certainly did a poor job, there's no question about that."

Peterson was getting death threats. He couldn't go to the store. There was a cruiser parked outside the house to protect him, for God's sake. They couldn't live here, not like this. A few nights later, around 2:00 in the morning, Peterson and Lydia got in the car and drove to his sister's.

About three weeks later, on March 15, the sheriff's office released the surveillance video to the whole world. The news networks freeze-framed it on his grainy silhouette standing against a wall, his gun drawn at no one. And they drew a circle around him.

PETERSON PULLS into a space in front of Chevelles, a diner with a kind of Nascar-meets-Route 66 theme, complete with a model stock car mounted over the kitchen and a hippies use side door sign up front.

While he's waiting for his burger and Diet Coke, his memory goes back to before. "You know what the funny thing was? Lydia wanted me to retire," he says. "As a matter of fact, I had the flu a few weeks before, and I actually had medication and everything. I had two years of sick time. I didn't need to go [to work]. I love what I did, though. I enjoyed my job. She was telling me even a year before. She said, ‘Hey, do you think about retiring and stuff?’ My only problem was I was divorced twice, so my pension goes to my ex-wives as well, part of it. I was staying to build and build and build, because I knew when I retired, they were going to get a portion of my FRS pension."

One way or another, a conversation with Peterson always goes back to the shooting. It is what we are here to talk about, yes, but even when you steer toward other topics, the shooting and what he did that day and what's happened to him since are always where you end up. His voice rises at one point: "It's just being hit, like, your whole world," he says. "I was a cop for 32 years. Honorable, never had—"

His eyes drop, he shakes his head. He calls what happened to him a "political lynching." He says he's "trapped in hell," his reputation ruined. "All of a sudden, I’m this media spectacle, and I’m like—and I’m still like—I don't know what the hell this is even about," he says. He sometimes speaks in great rivers that branch off into unexpected places, so vast is the scope of it all, so endless are the things he needs to tell himself.

. . . So we now have the Florida Department of Law Enforcement starting to investigate the police response to the shooting. Then the state of Florida decides to create the MSD Public Safety Commission. You’re aware of them?

. . . And I can sum it up like this: I became a target, and then they looked for a crime. That's what happened. I became their target and [they] said, "Now we got to go find a crime on this guy." I know that is a fact, that's what they tried to do, because the charges are just absolutely bullshit—the charges against me. The most serious charges are child neglect. Those are second-degree felony charges. I’m being charged for that animal, Nikolas Cruz, going on the third floor and shooting those students and staff members. I’m being charged with neglect for that animal and what he did. The problem is in the state of Flor—we have laws, and with laws, there's elements to a crime. Child neglect—the first element is, you must be a caregiver under Florida law. Under Florida law, under Chapter 39.01, under Chapter 39.01, Eric, Subsection 54, there's a heading, it says, "Other person responsible for a child's welfare. . . ."

. . . They arrested me. This isn't just, Oh, hey, we’ll call him the coward of Broward because we want to make people feel good. Even though it's bullshit, they actually arrested me. It's nothing, nothing of a citizen in this country, when they take your liberty away—take your liberty away for misconduct, for show, and with no probable cause. That's frightening.

. . . One thing about cops, we’re not trained to stand stationary when you hear gunfire outside. You move for cover. You don't sit there and then get shot because there's a possible sniper somewhere in the area. You don't do that. Long story short, long story short: I tell homicide, "I took a tactical position of cover." . . . I didn't even think at that point someone was shooting students in a building. So that portion, or the aspect of it, when people say, "active shooter"—because in the definition of "active shooter" is, you know, someone's actually shooting people. You know that. You either have the intel that's coming in, or you see it, or you see victims. I had none of that. There were no victims anywhere in the area that I was at; there was nobody running out of a building.

. . . Now what a lot of people—and nobody talks about this, is: My actual intel of the shots being outside were 100 percent accurate. Because when I reached the east side of the building, right? Nikolas Cruz already had shot people on the first floor in the hallway. Nikolas Cruz, after he went from the east, he went to the west through the hallway. When he got to the west side at the 1200 Building, he opened two double doors to go into an interior stairwell. When Nikolas Cruz entered the west stairwell on the first floor, it was at the same time that security monitor Aaron Feis was opening the exterior door to that stairwell. The door started opening, Nikolas Cruz fired. Well, where's the gunfire going out? It's going outside.

. . . Unfortunately we all think that. . . . We watch TV. I don't care if you watch Chicago P.D., Law & Order, you know, we watch TV, and you see a cop get on a scene, he runs right into a building, he runs up and shoots it. . . . People have that expectation, but in reality, it isn't like that.

. . . The echoing, it was...You couldn't tell where the shots were coming from at all. It was happening so fast. But you know, we have this expectation: "Well, you should have known he was in the building. You’re right near the building." I wish it was that simple. . . . And obviously I’m not thinking of this at that moment, but when you look at these buildings, they’re all in clusters, and the echo . . . and everyone who testified, there are more teachers and students who testified the shots were, "Oh, we thought it was at the football field." One teacher thought it was at the Walmart. She was 80 feet away from me. She goes, "I thought it was over at the Walmart down on Pine." . . . But that's why it's so easy to wrap this in a package and go, "Oh, that deputy should know; he was the first guy there." It didn't happen like that. It just didn't happen like that.

THERE IS what Peterson says happened, and there is what layers of investigators and lawyers and witnesses and other cops say should have happened, and it all gets twisted and tangled into what-ifs and contradictions and affirmations we all wish were true, but of course they can't all be true at once. Peterson says he knows what happened—his legal defense includes pointing out that the Broward County Sheriff's Office's active-shooter protocol requires "real-time intelligence" before entering the building, and even then it doesn't say an officer must enter. He says he knows he did the best he could, knows it better than anything he's ever known in his life. The reason he knows this, he says, is that he did not, in fact, know what was happening at all.

It goes in circles.

Peterson says that the sound of the gunfire bounced off the buildings, obscuring the location of the shots. He says that even if he’d somehow deduced that the shooting was actually happening inside the 1200 Building, the death toll might not have changed. He says that given when he arrived, he believes the only difference he could have made was engaging Cruz on the third floor, where ten people were shot and six died. But to do that, he would have had to first enter the gigantic building, clear each floor, and quickly and correctly triangulate Cruz's location to engage him.

Which he did not try to do.

The MSD Commission disputes Peterson's version. The commission maintains that Cruz was still on the first floor when Peterson arrived at the 1200 Building at 2:23 p.m. It asserts that there was "overwhelming evidence" that Peterson clearly knew the threat was coming from "within or within the immediate area of" the building. The report also declares that, in the era after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, it is "well-known" among law enforcement that the response to an active shooter is "to move toward the sound of gunfire and engage the suspect(s)."

In June 2019, Peterson and Lydia drove over to Asheville and caught an Allegiant Airlines flight to Fort Lauderdale, where he attended a hearing as part of an investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, a statewide agency. He was charged and booked for negligence, a misdemeanor related to perjury, and child neglect, citing the law specific to caregivers. He was then released on bail. The trial is scheduled for this fall. Images of Peterson at his arraignment in handcuffs have already been shared widely.

Deep in the MSD Commission report are findings that indicate larger systemic failures that day. Like how one armed officer per campus "is inadequate to ensure a timely and effective response to an active assailant situation" and how Peterson did not have access to a rifle or ballistic vest, which investigators recommended should be made "immediately available" to all school resource officers. The Broward County Sheriff's Office and the Coral Springs Police, the only agency to receive live updates from 911 operators, were on different law-enforcement radio channels. So even after kids started calling 911 from inside the 1200 Building, their reports of a live shooter weren't relayed to Peterson.

"I took a tactical position of cover at the 700 Building," Peterson says on the first morning we meet. It's a phrase he uses at least four times in the days we spend together. You see, he says, despite the radio calls about "strange sounds" coming from the 1200 Building, he always thought there was a sniper. "When I heard the gunfire outside, I was like, There's gunfire outside—sniper fire."

Peterson never mentioned a sniper in any of the radio dispatches published in the commission report, and there were no shots hitting the ground around him. He says if you "collectively listen" to his transmissions, "there is no doubt" about what he believed. And he says he told Officer Best to focus on the upper floors of the 1200 Building only after school officials reviewing surveillance footage radioed that to him.

Either way, investigators pointed out that Peterson had his last active-shooter training in April 2016 and "knew through his training that the appropriate response was to seek out the active shooter." Instead "he remained in a mostly visible position," the report notes, "which would be an extremely dangerous position if he truly believed there was a sniper." And he stayed there for 48 minutes total, even after backup arrived and breached the building.

Peterson's explanation, they concluded, was bullshit.

Judgment of him by much of the public remains devastating and unswerving. Cameron Kasky, a former Parkland student who survived and cofounded March For Our Lives, a movement for more gun control, is the son of a lawyer and a reserve police officer. "He saw danger and ran away," Kasky says. "He's an armed agent of the state who colossally failed in his job." Bitch-ass Scot Peterson. That's what Kasky calls him.

AT NIGHT he sometimes drinks a few cocktails. He does his projects—the rickety porch step, the house for the bear cubs. Stuff like that. He likes to clear brush and leaves. He has a chain saw, but when he wanted some taller trees cleared—50, 60 feet—he hired a guy.

And he sits in his recliner, and he thinks, and he talks to Lydia. Lately, she finds him staring at hundreds of depositions related to the charges he's facing in Florida, the ones that would pin some of the blame on him for allowing students in his care to be murdered, and which, if he is convicted, could send him to prison.

He explains the minutes that passed as he stood outside, minutes that grow muddier with the passage of time but that simultaneously become clearer in his own mind. He expresses his befuddlement about "what happened."

The day after the attack, the sheriff's office sent Peterson to meet with a crisis counselor, and a day later he gave a statement to homicide investigators. He was given five sessions with a grief counselor, but after his retirement he found his own therapist. He spent another year in counseling before giving it up when he left Florida and moved to Appalachia. "There have been times that I’ve thought about reinitiating," he says. In the meantime, he goes to church and listens to Christian music radio, which is blasting in his car when we first get in.

When Lydia finds him looking at the court documents, she texts an old friend of his to call him, or she’ll drag him on a day trip—there are some nice towns just over the Tennessee border. And she cries, but not where he can hear. "There's a light, because joy does come in the morning and God is a God of promises," she says. "But this is tough."

Lydia started getting on him to go to the gym about a year ago. He's always been a big guy, strong, but the anxiety of his post-shooting life didn't make him feel good, or strong. "I started gaining a little weight," he says. "You got all that stress, then you got weight—that's a bad combination, obviously. Health-wise."

She would look at him and say, "Babe, you gotta start. . . ."

He tries to go five days a week now, early—7:30, most mornings. He does the treadmill for 30 minutes between five and six miles per hour, staring out big windows onto a frozen field. He lifts weights for 45 minutes, ending with lunge squats. As he talks about his routine, the conversation eventually comes back to what it always comes back to.

. . . I lost about 45 pounds already, and I’m proud. But I also know physically, you have to. It goes hand in hand, mental and physical. And the stress, that's unfortunate. We can control stress in our mind, we can compartmentalize it maybe, or do whatever, but it's always there. . . . With criminal charges, I live every day with that right now. I don't know what can happen. I do believe in justice. I do believe in the rule of law, but I’m not a stupid man. If these charges don't get dismissed—which they should, before this ever goes to trial, once the state attorney really learns and knows the facts of this case—but if it doesn't, I still have to go to maybe a trial. And then I have six people in Broward County that have my fate—not only my fate, hers, my family, everybody—that hangs then on six people.

. . . I’m in limbo. I hate to say it, and I say this to a couple of my buddies, it's almost like being told you have cancer and you just don't know if it's terminal.

It's freezing outside, but he wears only a T-shirt, baggy shorts, and a bright-red headband. He has plenty of old police-logo shirts and hats but doesn't wear them. Heading home, he gets going again, driving clear past the turnoff to his road, so he has to turn around in the parking lot of an auto shop. He's worried about a jury. "How can I, as a human being, not sit there and think that people could be persuaded by the tragedy and forget what the facts are and just say, ‘Oh, he should have went in’?"

I ask him, once and for all, if he thinks he could have stopped Nikolas Cruz that day had he entered the 1200 Building. He says, "I go to bed every night knowing I did the best I could with the information I had, which was nothing."

That's been the subject of much debate, of course. But it's what he tells himself, because it's the kind of thing people need to tell themselves, because the most basic truth is that Scot Peterson didn't save anyone. There were plenty of reasons Cruz ended up at Stoneman Douglas that day—tragic breakdowns in the way society is supposed to protect itself from such people. But this story really doesn't start until 2:19 p.m. on February 14, 2018, at which point Scot Peterson was the only real defense for every victim that day. Maybe he couldn't have saved them all. Maybe he's not a coward, maybe he is.

There's one thing he definitely is not: a victim.

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