PARKLAND, Fla. – When Coral Springs police officer Gil Monzon arrived at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School minutes after a gunman unleashed a massacre that killed 17 people Feb. 14, he says he found two Broward County sheriff's deputies in the parking lot.
He asked for the shooter's location, and was told they didn't know it, but he could see a body next to the freshman building at Stoneman Douglas and bullet marks in its third-floor windows.
He said in reports released Monday that he and three other Coral Springs officers immediately went to the building, checked the body and then entered, where they immediately found a victim standing against a wall before falling to the floor.
Audio recordings released by the Coral Springs Police Department last week showed the initial confusion about what building the gunman was in.
"Units on the shooting. We have got three people shot in room 1216 in the freshman building. I am not sure (where) the building is though," one officer said.
The four pages written by three officers detail what they found when they arrived at the school, where another 17 people were wounded. They corroborate earlier reports that the first deputies at the scene failed to enter the building to confront the gunman and assist the wounded.
Officer Tim Burton, the first on-duty Coral Springs officer to arrive, grabbed his rifle and was directed toward the freshman building, where he found Deputy Scot Peterson, the school's security officer, taking cover behind a concrete column.
File: Coral Springs Police Department supplemental reports for Parkland school shooting
He said Peterson told him he had not heard any shots for several minutes, but to watch his back, because the shooter might be in the parking lot.
Peterson would soon retire from his deputy job under criticism from Sheriff Scott Israel, who said he should have immediately entered the building to find the killer.
Parents, meanwhile, speculated that victims on the third floor could have survived had first responders reached them more quickly. Ryan Petty, whose daughter Alaina died in the attack, tweeted over the weekend, "6 on the 3rd may have lived if anyone had gone in."
Monzon said that after dragging the victim who collapsed out of the building, he and three other officers went back inside.
"The hallway was quiet and full of thick smoke from gunfire," he wrote. They found a female hiding in an office and led her outside.
By then, another team of Coral Springs officers entered the building from the other side, so to avoid accidentally firing at each other, Monzon and his team moved to the second floor, where they found students and teachers hiding in classrooms. Still unsure if the gunman was in the building, they left survivors locked in classrooms and moved to the third floor, where Monzon said he "encountered several deceased students throughout the hall." He was then sent to help clear a nearby building.
On Friday, the Broward Sheriff's Office released its own reports from deputies, including one who sped four miles from another school and joined Coral Springs officers searching the freshman building. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is also preparing a report on the overall law enforcement response.
Nikolas Cruz, 19, a former Stoneman Douglas student, fled the building after his gun jammed, melding in with students as they ran to the street. He was captured about an hour later about a mile away.
His attorneys have said he would plead guilty to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder in exchange for life without parole. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.
