Photo: CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP/Getty Images
By: The opinion Posted Jul 12, 2023, 17:24 pm EDT
A Florida judge on Wednesday approved a motion to reenact the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.in which 17 people died, after parents of several victims filed a request in a civil lawsuit.
The plaintiffs had requested in the motion that reenactment of the shooting was allowed before the building where his sons were killed is demolished.
The purpose is to document the “movements and actions” of the former head of security at the institute, officer Scot Peterson.outside the building where the event that claimed the lives of 17 people took place, including 14 students.
The intent of the parents of four of the victims is to prove that Peterson heard more than 70 shots and did not act during the shooting.
The judge wants the reenactment to take place before the start of the school year.
Peterson, who had been accused in court of doing nothing to stop the killing, was found not guilty at the end of June. of the charges against him.
After four days of deliberations, the jury cleared Peterson, 60, of the 11 charges against him, including “child neglect and culpable negligence”, for his null action to prevent the massacre perpetrated at the aforementioned school in secondary, as argued by the State Prosecutor’s Office.
The reenactment, which will be videotaped, will parallel the shooter’s movements inside the 1200 building in 2018.
In the motion filed last week 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 fourteen students and three staff members with a semi-automatic rifle.
The five plaintiffs, Meadow Pollack, Luke Thomas Hoyer, Alaina Petty, Madeline “Maddy” Wilford, and Alex Schachter ask the judge in the three-page motion to allow them to enter the building “for the purpose of making audio and video recordings of a recreation of the movements of the murderer and the shots” 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.”
Add the document that the recreation would be “an almost perfect simulation” of the shooting and the same crime weapon would be used in ita Smith & Wesson MP 15 semi-automatic assault rifle, ammunition of the same caliber and cartridge type 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.
Broward County authorities announced that family members of the 34 victims of the incident (including 17 wounded) can make private visits to the 1200 building of the school, which has been closed since the shooting, if they wish.
Last February marked the fifth anniversary of the shooting perpetrated by Cruz, a former student of that school, who on the same day of the massacre confessed to the police that he had been the perpetrator and later pleaded guilty in court to all charges.
Cruz was spared a death sentence because there was no unanimous jury, a requirement that is no longer necessary in Florida, under a new law promoted by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who expressed his discontent that the young man was sentenced “only” to life imprisonment.
The new law establishes that it is enough that eight of the twelve members of the jury agree to impose the death sentence on a convicted person.
Cruz is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
With information from EFE
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