FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – The judge in the civil case brought by four families who lost children in the 2018 Parkland school shooting, along with a survivor of the massacre, granted their request to conduct a reenactment of the shooting in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School 1200 building.
The five plaintiffs — the families of victims Luke Hoyer, Alaina Petty, Meadow Pollack and Alex Schachter, plus survivor Madeline Wilford — are suing former Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputy Scot Peterson and BSO itself.
They had asked for a “reenactment that would parallel the killer’s movements, and the gunfire, inside of Building 12, in relation to Defendant Scot Peterson’s movements and actions outside of the building, in order to demonstrate that Peterson could hear the gunshots and derive where they were coming from.”
The reenactments would be based on school surveillance videos of the massacre that show second-by-second the actions and locations of Peterson and shooter Nikolas Cruz during the six-minute attack.
“This reenactment, if it is to take place, would take place within the next month,” Broward Judge Carol-Lisa Phillips said. “I want to make sure this gets done before school starts.”
Reenactors playing Cruz would fire nearly 140 blanks from guns identical to the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle he used from the same spots on each floor. The school’s fire alarms would sound at the same moments they did during the shooting.
Meanwhile, reenactors playing Peterson and wearing a recording device would duplicate his actions as he rode on a golf cart from his office about 100 yards (90 meters) from the classroom building. Peterson was dropped off about 10 yards (nine meters) from the building about two minutes after the shooting began.
“The purpose as we outlined in our motion is to demonstrate that, contrary to Peterson’s assertions, he could and did hear the gunshots, and he could indeed derive where they were coming from,” plaintiffs’ attorney David Brill said.
Peterson went toward a door and drew his handgun but then backed away, taking cover next to a neighboring building. He remained there for 40 minutes, long after the shooting ended and other law enforcement officers went inside, making radio calls to dispatchers and other deputies.
The families and injured insist he could have gone inside and shot Cruz or at least distracted him, saving the six killed and four wounded after he arrived at the building.
Peterson, 60, insists that echoes prevented him from pinpointing where the shots were coming from and that he would have charged inside if he had known Cruz’s location. He retired shortly after the shooting, but was then retroactively fired.
Peterson was recently found not guilty of child neglect in a criminal trial. The judge warned both parties not to reference the criminal case in proceedings, as criminal trials use a different burden of proof.
Brill told the judge he wants to reenact the shooting because “we don’t want to leave anything to chance and allow Peterson to escape justice in this civil case like he did in the criminal one.”
Peterson’s attorney, Michael Piper, said the defense team may also now consider performing their own reenactment. Phillips told the attorney that if they intend to do that, they needed to work with the plaintiffs’ attorneys so they’re either done the same day or consecutive days.
He had questioned the timing of the plaintiffs’ motion.
“This is not accidental,” Piper said. “Peterson just finished a criminal trial.”
He added: “A criminal jury acquitted because he (Peterson) didn’t know where the shots were coming from so Brill knows he has a hole in the case and so he wants to make a movie.”
Piper said he doesn’t believe the reenactments will accurately depict what Peterson heard. He said blanks don’t sound exactly like bullets and it is impossible to accurately recreate the direction and angle of Cruz’s gun. There were also hundreds of people in the building, others in the area and cars in the parking lot that would muffle and deflect sounds.
“It is going to be impossible for this to be reliable ... evidence,” Piper said. “There are so many variables that cannot be accounted for.”
Piper had also questioned whether the reenactment would inflict more trauma on the Parkland community.
Linda Beigel Schulman, the mother of slain teacher Scott Beigel, weighed in following the ruling.
“The civil trial is coming up and I want justice. And if it has to be the reenactment, of the murder, than it has to be the reenactment,” Beigel Schulman said. “We need to have justice. And I apologize for, you know, what it may do to some people in the community. But the bottom line is, I think that we all deserve justice. And the only way that we’re going to get it is to have the reenactment, to have the reenactment, just the way we were. We were given that right today.”
Costs of any reenactments will be borne by the lawsuit parties conducting them.
An attorney for the Broward school district said during the hearing that it will comply with the order.
The next steps — first and foremost, figuring out scheduling — will be ironed out at a July 20 status hearing. There will be a hearing about whether any reenactments would be admissible at a later date.
It is unclear whether the reenactments will delay the school district’s plan to demolish the classroom building, which has been locked behind a chain-link barrier as evidence in the Cruz and Peterson criminal cases while the rest of the campus reopened to students in 2018. The jury in Cruz’s penalty trial last year toured the building, but the judge in Peterson’s trial rejected a prosecution motion to have his jury do the same.