Parents of Parkland victims ask to recreate 2018 mass shooting before demolition of building where the crime took place

Photo: RHONA WISE/AFP/Getty Images

Survivors and family members of the Parkland school shooting poured into the building that was the center of the 2018 massacre and in a last-ditch effort to delay demolition of the site, They asked a judge to allow the re-enactment of the massacre before the building where their sons were murdered is destroyed.

The plaintiffs want to document the “movements and actions” of former high school security officer Scot Peterson outside the building where the mass shooting took place that killed 17 people, including 14 students.

Peterson, who had been accused in court of doing nothing to stop the killing, was found not guilty in late June of the charges against him.

During this emotional visit, family members and survivors asked to enter and tour the building, a private moment reserved only for them. Representatives from the Broward prosecutor’s office, advocates from the Eagles Haven center and Broward sheriff’s officers accompanied them.

This moment occurs after A jury cleared Peterson, 60, of all 11 charges against him, including “child neglect and culpable negligence.”for its null action to prevent the massacre perpetrated at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, as argued by the State Attorney’s Office.

Therefore, in the motion filed in a Broward County court, north of Miami, the plaintiffs request “permission to recreate” the events that occurred at the aforementioned school, where Nikolas Cruz, then 19, entered and killed with a semi-automatic rifle to 14 students and three staff members.

The five plaintiffs, Meadow Pollack, Luke Thomas Hoyer, Alaina Petty, Madeline “Maddy” Wilford, and Alex Schachter they ask the judge in the three-page motion to allow them to enter the school building “for the purpose of making audio and video recordings of a reenactment of the movements of the killer and the shots fired.” inside the institute.

And establish a relationship with Peterson’s “movements and actions” outside the educational facility to “demonstrate” that the former security officer “was able to hear the shots and deduce where they came from.”

The motion notes that “although Plaintiffs have ample evidence that Peterson heard more than 70 shots and knew where they came from, such demonstrative evidence cannot be duplicated.”

The document adds that the recreation would be “an almost perfect simulation” of the shooting and would use the same crime weapon, a Smith & Wesson MP 15 semi-automatic assault rifle, ammunition of the same caliber and type of cartridge used by the murderer.

The re-enactment, which would last about two hours, would be performed by the plaintiffs’ attorneys, agents and experts at the latter’s expense.

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