In the five years since the Parkland shooting, I’ve read my fair share of books, reports, articles, and editorials regarding the charges made against Scot Peterson. Peterson, we’re told, was a coward, derelict in his duties, neglectful of the welfare of the children he was tasked with protecting, and, aside from Cruz himself, the fundamental cause of the carnage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Some of this material makes a valuable contribution in a narrowly limited way: it identifies facts relevant to reaching a verdict on Peterson’s actions. Read carefully, and taken cumulatively, I would say that at the very least, it exonerates Peterson of the criminal charges against him, and plausibly of all the others as well. But virtually none of it–literally none of the hundreds of pages I’ve read, the vast majority of the pages written on the subject–really drills down to ask the right questions, seek the right answers, or get the right answers. To read this literature is, for the most part, to drown in a sea of irrelevance.

To pass judgment on Peterson, we need, at a minimum, evidentially-supported answers to all of the following questions:

1. What, in chronological order, happened during the shooting?
2. Exactly when (meaning, down to the second or even the micro-second) did each event happen?
3. Where did each event happen?
4. Who was proximate to each event, and at what time, when it happened?
5. For anyone who was proximate, what did that person know when it happened, how did they know, and how is it possible for us to determine with certainty that they knew it?
6. How did the preceding factors interact?

Notice that the preceding questions cannot be answered by a single linear time-line. What they require is a multidimensional re-enactment of the events.* We need to know, with respect to a set of interacting agents, events, and factors, how these things interacted, in all their complexity, in space and time. Literally nothing in literature (construing literature “broadly” to include videos) does this. 

Suppose we had the answers to (1)-(6) in hand. Once we did–and only once we did–would it be appropriate to consider possible courses of action, e.g., how to “engage the shooter.” Assume, for any actor (besides the shooter), that we start to consider potential courses of action that should have been taken. In that case, we’d need (at a minimum) to know the following: 

1. For any course of action proposed for any individual in the scenario, how would this action affect other individuals on scene (including Cruz)?
2. For any given course of action, what are the probabilities of success or (complete) failure?
3. For any course of action, what are the risks short of complete failure? 
4. For any course of action, what is the standard by which we judge the weight and probability of benefits to harms? 
5. For any course of action, what is the actual verdict on the weight and probability of benefits to harms involved?
6. For any course of action, given the preceding, and all things considered: should it have been done?

Even this is not an exhaustive list of relevant questions, but in any case, I can say with full confidence that no one writing on this subject has even made a half-hearted attempt to answer all of them in the fully systematic manner that the subject demands. 

And the premium for getting things right is, I’d think, pretty high. What we’re talking about, after all, are the life-prospects of a person facing 96 years in prison for a “crime” hitherto unknown in the annals of American law, while facing a wrongful death suit, and enduring five years of opprobrium as “The Coward of Broward County.”

It’s worth pausing on the unprecedented nature of this trial and the charges involved. No one in American history has ever been arrested, charged, or put on trial for “child neglect” or any similar charge because he failed, within a few minutes, to localize the source of shots fired in a complex, semi-urban, dynamic live fire situation, failed to rush into a building in complete chaos, failed to surmount the failures of a failed communication system, failed to overcome the 20 minute delay of the building’s video system, and then failed to confront an attacker more heavily armed and better defended than him (without knowing how many attackers there were)–an attacker who could see him, but whom he couldn’t see. This is the “crime” Peterson has been alleged to have committed.  

In this respect, the prosecution of Scot Peterson is far more radical an affair than the prosecution of Donald Trump. Many people have been prosecuted for the crime Trump is alleged to have committed; it’s just that none of those people have been presidents. But no one has ever been charged with the crime (“crime”) alleged of Peterson. No one ever previously imagined that it was a crime. If Peterson is convicted, the precedent will have been established, not just for law enforcement but for parents and all other caretakers: a parent (or teacher or babysitter or nurse…) who, under conditions of radical uncertainty and lethal danger, fails to risk near-certain death to (try to) save the children under her care is on this view “neglectful,” and deserves to spend the rest of her life in prison.

Your kid is being attacked by a shark? Drowning at sea in an undertow? Trapped in a burning building? Being beaten at the hands of a savage spouse? Fear is no defense. Danger is irrelevant. The probability of success or failure doesn’t matter. Unless you risk death then and there with no thought whatsoever for your own survival, and no thought as to the probability of success, you are criminally neglectful. The totalitarian preposterousness of this claim does not appear to have been noticed. But it’s there. Don’t for a minute imagine that we can count on the heartfelt goodness of our prosecutors to apply their new-found legal plaything only to cops and similarly dispensable people. That’s not how American law enforcement works. If they win, what they’ll have established is that legally speaking, any “caretaker” (on a sliding scale definition of “caretaker”) who refuses to throw her life away to save a child in distress is a criminal. Having established the precedent, they’ll only be too happy to apply it. That’s what precedents are for.  

And then there’s the selective character of the prosecution. Peterson has been charged with this “crime,” but no one else comparably situated has. And plenty of people were comparably situated. We are somehow supposed to ignore all of the following: despite the presence of numerous other officers on the scene, no one else rushed into the building during the shooting, no one else localized the gunfire, and no one else saved the day that Peterson is criminally liable for not saving. Ignoring these facts will, I suppose, help us ignore the double standard involved: all of these people did exactly what Peterson is alleged to have done, yet none of have been criminally charged with anything. Indeed, these very people are witnesses for the prosecution against Peterson. 

We are also supposed to ignore the amply documented fact that others besides Peterson acted in blatantly obvious dereliction of duty–dereliction far more obvious and culpable than Peterson–without being criminally liable: one campus monitor saw Cruz carrying a rifle-sized bag into the building and failed either to confront him or to call a Code Red; one school official not only failed to call a Code Red, but hid in a closet for the entire duration of the event. But neither of them have been deemed criminals. There were multiple documented, admitted equipment failures on scene that led to confusion throughout the event, and interfered ubiquitously with attempts to pin down what was happening during the shooting in real time. But none of the people tasked with upkeep of the relevant equipment have been deemed criminals, either.

It is a mystery why not. If Peterson is a criminal, he was part of a criminal conspiracy involving dozens of other people in law enforcement and school administration, each as “responsible” for what happened as he was. If he’s on trial, why not them? If they’re not, why is he?  

Somehow, in the universe inhabited by South Florida law enforcement, only one fact matters, because only one fact has really captured the public imagination: Scot Peterson is a criminal because Scot Peterson is a coward because Scot Peterson failed to hear (or on one account smell) the source of gunfire behind hurricane-resistant walls, rush into the relevant building single-handedly, and stop a heavily armed, mobile shooter across a debris-strewn interior full of civilians at a distance of 184 feet, up two flights of stairs, in less than two minutes. How do we “know” this? Because we saw him, on video, “cowering” in a “place of cover” rather than entering the building. And in this age of instantaneous knowledge through inspection of a single YouTube video, that’s all anyone needs to convict someone of a crime. As for the near certainty of Peterson’s being shot to pieces if he’d engaged in the heroics expected of him, well, only criminals care about things like that. 

A fully comprehensive account of the Parkland shooting (as regards the charges made against Scot Peterson) has yet to be written. It’ll be a sad day in the republic of letters if the person who ends up writing it is a Provider Support Associate for a health-care revenue cycle management company (me), but, I suppose, stranger things have happened. For now, the closest approximation to such an account is Philip Hayden’s expert witness testimony, given in the course of depositions taken in the wrongful death suit against Peterson. I received a copy of Hayden’s report via Peterson’s and my mutual friend, Kevin Bolling, and have gotten the green light from Peterson and his attorney (and through his office, Hayden), to post it here. 

I’ll post Hayden’s report in my next post in this series (within the next day or so). That said, I post Hayden’s report with the following provisos or reservations:

1. Though I fundamentally agree with Hayden’s findings, I do not regard his report as a fully comprehensive account of Peterson’s role in the shooting according to the criteria I laid out at the beginning of this post. Hayden’s report answers many but not all of the relevant questions I posed (That said, of the ones it answers, it answers all of them, without exception, in Peterson’s favor). A comprehensive account would either answer all of the questions, or admit failure in the attempt. So Hayden’s report is, by my lights, incomplete.
2. Though I agree with the text of Hayden’s report (about 41 pages long), I don’t agree with Appendix A, “Timeline of Events” (about 5 pages long), which strikes me as inconsistent with the claims of the report, internally inconsistent, incomplete, and poorly edited. As an editor with twenty years of experience in the field, if I had received Hayden’s Appendix in the form in which it was submitted, I would have returned it for revision. 
3. No author, to my knowledge, has offered a cogent explanation for why Peterson thought the gunfire was taking place outside. But there is one. Hayden mentions the relevant fact but fails to use it in an explanatory way (p. 20): the relevant fact is that the first shots Peterson heard were in fact outside. As Cruz traversed the first floor of the building, an unarmed campus monitor, Aaron Feis, opened a door to enter the building and investigate. Cruz happened to be at the door at the precise moment when Feis opened it, and shot him. Peterson arrived at the scene almost precisely when Feis was shot, and reported having heard those very shots in real time. The shots through the open door at Feis were followed by a full minute of silence.
4. No author I have read (including Hayden) seems to have grasped that the preceding fact by itself serves to exonerate Peterson of the criminal charges against him (and indeed, of most of the others). Peterson has consistently claimed that he thought that the gunfire was outside (and by implication that the gunman was). In fact, though the bulk of the shooting took place inside, what Peterson heard upon reaching the scene was a shot fired through an open door towards the outdoors. In other words, what Peterson heard was, by coincidence, a shot fired “outside” by a gunman inside, followed by a minute of (gunfire) silence. Given this, it was not unreasonable of Peterson to have inferred (however incorrectly) that the gunman was outside. Indeed, many officers and other eyewitnesses corroborate Peterson on this point: Peterson aside, many people at the scene thought that the gunfire was taking place outside, and reported it as such. Though Hayden mentions this, he doesn’t, in my view, give it sufficient emphasis. It’s a crucial point, perhaps the crucial point. Peterson’s having heard an outdoor shot (followed by silence) is sufficient to establish that Peterson reasonably thought that the gunfire and gunman were outside. 
5. Peterson has claimed that he was unable to localize the source of the gunfire. Many people have claimed to find this implausible, but I know of no one (including Hayden) to have made use of the extensive scientific literature on this subject in applied acoustics and related fields. Though I can’t claim to be an expert on the subject, I have done a fair bit of non-expert reading of the expert literature, and have in fact been in such settings myself (that is, been in live fire situations outdoors, in urban settings in the Palestinian West Bank). There is a clear consensus in the scientific literature that shots fired outdoors cannot be localized by sound alone. Indeed, the claim is typically made that it is difficult enough to track a moving sniper if the tracker has both visual and auditory cues.** But deprived of visual cues, as Peterson was, it is nearly impossible–physically impossible–for a human being to track a moving sniper (outdoors, in urban-like space) by auditory cues alone. At a minimum, anyone making such a claim owes us a demonstration by re-enactment or quasi-experimental findings of some kind. To the best of my knowledge, no one has done that. On its face, the claim–though made repeatedly, and with great, indeed arrogant confidence– has zero credibility. 

That said, even with these reservations, Hayden’s report is a quantum leap ahead of virtually anything else the average reader is likely to encounter in the mainstream news or online. In my next post, I’ll post it, quote from it, and offer a few very brief comments on it. 

*The video embedded in the link is a good first approximation, but still falls short of what I have in mind. Note the crucial moment at 14:23:26:04 when Aaron Feis (blue dot) opens the west door (1200A) at the exact moment when Cruz (black dot) happens to be there. The video does not show Peterson’s position or movement (much less his epistemic situation) at that moment: he had arrived in the vicinity of Building 1200 about five seconds before, close to the east doors, i.e., 1200B. But that, in my view, is the crucial moment. The audio record has Peterson acknowledging the shots fired at Feis almost simultaneously with their being fired. What Peterson says is equivocal as between the shots being fired in and (outside but) near the building. Indeed, his uncertainty on this point was in a sense absolutely precise: the shots were fired from within the building through an open door at a target outside the building. In that sense, they were both “inside” the building and “outside” of it.

Peterson’s later (supposedly incriminating) claims to have heard gunfire “in” the building all reflect this same initial ambiguity or confusion: they reflect his having come on the scene and heard gunfire that was in some vague sense both “inside” and “outside” the building. From his vantage, there was no way to know that a shot fired from inside the west door out of the west door would, a minute later, lead to shots fired on the third floor of the building. Even if Peterson had known that the gunman had fired out the west door, there would have been no way to guess which way he would have gone from there–out the door, or up the stairs? Peterson is literally being held liable for his failure to get that guess right. But the a priori probabilities were 50/50. Indeed, Cruz had originally intended to stage an outdoor shooting.

A more adequate re-enactment would show Peterson’s arriving at the east doors as Feis was shot by Cruz while opening the west doors–modeling what Peterson heard, including the silence that followed Feis’s shooting (as regards gunfire), and the chaos that reigned (as regards radio communications). I have not seen such a re-enactment.

**”In general, the exact shooter position cannot be estimated using shock wave observations alone, but also muzzle blast observations are needed.” Toni Makinen and Pasi Pertila, “Shooter localization and bullet trajectory, caliber, and speed estimation based on detected firing sounds,” Applied Acoustics 71:10 (October 2010), p. 2 of the online version.