FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. _ The Coral Springs police officer who first arrived at the Parkland school massacre stayed in the parking lot as students inside were dying because he was given inaccurate information, according to radio tapes released Wednesday.
Officer Tim Burton told a dispatcher that Scot Peterson _ the school resource officer with the Broward Sheriff's Office _ was giving him his information at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14.
Burton said, "I'm with Douglas' SRO getting info," and said the shooter was last seen in a north parking lot by a three-story building. Burton is heard saying in the radio transmissions he has his rifle and is in the east part of the building in the parking lot.
Police say Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 people inside the school, and was able to escape the building by blending in among the students fleeing the Parkland school.
Police later found and arrested him.
According to a timeline of the shooting by the Broward Sheriff's Office, Peterson within minutes focused on the 1200 building, where the shooting happened. Peterson told others to "not approach the 12 or 1300 building" and to "stay at least 500 feet away at this point," the Sheriff's Office said.
Former Coral Springs Police Chief Tony Pustizzi, who retired from the department earlier this month, said Wednesday that his agency lost a few valuable minutes because of the misinformation.
"By not telling the (officers that) shots were fired from the building, he made it sound like the shooter was out of the school," Pustizzi said of Peterson. "Did he not know? He can hear the shots being fired."
Pustizzi said Burton "had his gun and he was ready to go but he didn't know where to go."
Peterson waited outside during the massacre when he should have gone into the building and engaged the shooter, Sheriff Scott Israel said at a news conference a week after the shooting.
Peterson has since resigned and retired. An attorney representing him said he believed the gunshots were coming from outside the buildings on campus.
Peterson said the initial report was of firecrackers, not gunshots, in the 1200 building, where the killer was shooting. When Peterson reached the building, he heard gunshots, but "believed that those gunshots were originating from outside of any of the buildings on the school campus," according to a statement from Peterson released by his lawyer last month.
As police raced to the high school, 911 dispatchers told officers they could hear the sound of the bullets flying.
"We can hear them in the background," a Coral Springs dispatcher said. "Our 911 lines are blowing up."
Burton, a school resource officer at Eagle Ridge Elementary School, gave his account of what happened during a news conference last month.
Burton said he heard the call about an active shooter at Stoneman Douglas and raced over, and a school security officer picked him up on a golf cart and gave him Cruz's description and where the shooting was taking place.
Two minutes after Cruz entered the school, Peterson is seen on surveillance video near the southeast corner of 1200 building, the Sheriff's Office said.
Burton ran to the 1200 building, and took his position behind a tree and black SUV, scanning for the shooter in the parking lot.
Peterson told Burton that the shooter could be outside, warning, "Watch out behind you, you could be in a bad position," Pustizzi said.
That left Burton with uncertainty about where he should be, especially because the shooting has already stopped, Pustizzi said. The campus was eerily quiet, because students were hunkered down, he said.
"He just didn't know where to go," Pustizzi said.
Four other Coral Springs officers show up and enter the building. Burton joins them and helps rescue wounded students, including a girl shot in the knee, he said.
Officers on scene had to deal with other issues that may have caused delays.
They were given incorrect information about where the shooter was because officers looking at school security footage didn't realize, or didn't tell their colleagues, that the video they were watching was recorded and not live.
The "communication failure" led police to believe they were tracking the shooter in real time, when in fact they were seeing footage from 20 minutes earlier, Pustizzi said after the shooting.
The first two agencies on scene _ Coral Springs and the Sheriff's Office _ also have two separate systems for 911 calls and police radios. The county's police radio system, used by the Sheriff's Office, crashed at times during the response.
The radio problems left some law enforcement officers unable to communicate and hear from dispatchers on the county system. They included Broward Sheriff's Office Capt. Jan Jordan, who commands the Parkland district for the agency. She was sometimes not able to hear what was coming over the radios.
It also forced officers to at times ditch their radios, use hand signals and stay in groups to relay information to each other.
"We're kind of running two separate operations," an officer says on the radio transmissions released Wednesday.
