MIAMI _ Ten people lay dead or dying on the first floor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School's freshman building when assistant football coach Aaron Feis rushed across campus and burst through the structure's west door to confront Nikolas Cruz.
The burly Feis nearly grabbed Cruz, who was heading up a stairwell to the second floor when Cruz shot him.
Not far from the building, Broward Sheriff's Office deputy Scot Peterson heard the gunfire crack out the open door.
It was Feb. 14, Valentine's Day, two minutes after the shooting started.
Gripped by an unholy bloodlust, Cruz kept firing for another four minutes, until 2:27 p.m., going up two flights of stairs to kill six more people, sometimes pumping more bullets into the wounded lying helpless before him.
Much went wrong between the time Cruz started shooting at Stoneman Douglas and the moment 11 minutes later when law enforcement officers first entered the building through the same door Feis used: Broward County's long-troubled emergency communication system broke down. Some deputies appear not to have followed active shooter training _ which they hadn't received since 2016. And agencies didn't share crucial information that could have led to a faster response.
"It was a cluster you-know-what of errors and mistakes," said Fred Guttenberg, the father of student Jaime Guttenberg, who died in the rampage.
Even though at least three BSO deputies arrived in time to hear Cruz's gunfire, neither they nor Peterson went into the building immediately to stop him _ unlike the unarmed Feis. The first BSO deputies on scene said they could not pinpoint the shooting to Building 12, although Cruz was firing bullets through exterior windows _ leaving visible holes _ and students were running from the building screaming. Some deputies were said to have taken cover behind their cars as lives leaked onto Stoneman Douglas' floors.
Coral Springs police officers saw the deputies _ and two officers were so angry they put the damning information into their official reports. One Coral Springs cop even said a BSO deputy taking cover behind a tree told him the shooter was on the third floor. (Feis, who died, had been alerted to the danger by a student who received a chilling warning from Cruz just before he opened fire. He also worked as a security guard at the school.)
Cruz's semi-automatic rifle, a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 .223, left devastating wounds. Seconds mattered.
Gunshot victims "can bleed to death in only a few minutes," said Pete Blair, executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. "It's important to stop (attackers) as quickly as possible."
Two of the 17 victims were pronounced dead shortly after arriving at a local hospital, meaning they were still clinging to life by the time police got into the building and started driving the wounded in golf carts to paramedics staging nearby. The others died at Stoneman Douglas, according to a Broward Health spokeswoman.
Now, both Coral Springs and BSO are pointing fingers at each other as various state investigations try to piece together the mistakes and offer solutions. But those fixes may be months away _ even though another mass shooter could strike tomorrow.
How law enforcement responded is still under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, as well as a special state commission set up by the Florida Legislature.
But it's clear that BSO _ a law enforcement behemoth led by Sheriff Scott Israel, who touted his own "amazing leadership" days after the shooting _ wasn't prepared to handle a mass shooting in one of its safest districts.
"Coral Springs reacted the way police are expected to," said attorney Alex Arreaza, who is representing wounded student Anthony Borges in a planned lawsuit against BSO. "If only BSO reacted like they did, maybe things would be different."
Israel told the Miami Herald on Thursday he will not comment on the shooting until the FDLE and special committee reviews are wrapped up _ and that BSO won't do a comprehensive internal investigation until then.
"We are at a standstill right now," he said.
This account of how the response to the Parkland school shooting unfolded is based on hundreds of pages of law enforcement documents and hours of 911 calls and police and fire-rescue radio chatter, as well as interviews with more than a dozen students, teachers and first responders who were at the school.
In addition to the dead, 17 people were wounded, some of them seriously, and police and paramedics certainly saved lives. But the Herald found that mistakes made by individual officers and systemic problems in Broward County law enforcement severely hampered efforts to save lives. Among the most significant:
_ Because of a patchwork 911 system in Coral Springs and Parkland, emergency calls made from cellphones inside the Parkland school were routed to a Coral Springs call center, not to BSO, which polices Parkland. That meant BSO deputies trying to figure out where the shooting was happening weren't hearing first-hand information from those being attacked.
_ Coral Springs police weren't immediately notified of the mass shooting at nearby Stoneman Douglas by Coral Springs' joint police-fire dispatch center. One of the first Coral Springs officers into Building 12 said he learned of the shooting from a Coral Springs Fire Department commander four minutes after the first 911 call came in.
_ BSO's radio system overloaded as deputies talked over each other, causing such communication problems they resorted to using hand signals. The radio difficulties hindered the ability of BSO's Parkland district captain to receive information and direct her deputies, limiting her effectiveness as an on-scene commander. The system, contracted by Broward County, not BSO, is undergoing a $59.5 million upgrade expected to finish in 2019.
_ BSO and Coral Springs police use different radio frequencies. An on-the-fly attempt to fuse the channels so Coral Springs officers and BSO deputies could communicate failed. That meant BSO and Coral Springs were responding to the same situation but acting as separate teams and not sharing information.
_ Because of the heavy demands for various types of law enforcement training _ including how to use body cameras and how to safely confront those suffering from mental illness _ BSO says it has not held active shooter training since 2016.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Israel blamed Peterson for what went wrong, holding a national news conference to say the school resource officer's conduct left him "sick to my stomach."
"He never went in," Israel said.
Singling out Peterson, who resigned, may have been a political mistake for Israel, an elected official, according to Robert Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University who co-authored a book chronicling the history of BSO.
"His strategy initially was to blame one officer," Jarvis said. "There's never one officer who is responsible all by him or herself."
A woman who answered the door at Peterson's home last week declined to comment.
