On Tuesday evening, Broward County prosecutors released video of a sworn statement by a security monitor at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who was the first to witness the shooter arrive at the school holding a large bag. The monitor’s testimony contradicts claims he made in a recent interview and underscores that the shooter was a known threat to officials.
Andrew Medina, an unarmed security monitor who was seated in a golf cart near one of the school’s entrances, was the first to see the shooter arrive at the school. The shooter, who Medina made clear was a known threat by all the security personnel, stepped out of an Uber vehicle holding a large bag.
“I knew the kid,” Medina told Broward detectives in his sworn testimony to investigators in February, reported by the Miami Herald. The second he saw the shooter approach the school “like on a mission,” Medina said, he began frantically texting the other security personnel.
“We had a meeting about him last year and we said if there’s gonna be anybody whose gonna come to this school and shoot this school up, it’s going to be that kid,” said Medina. “He was rebellious, you know … he had 666 on his book bag. He had the [anti-] Jewish swastika. He had all that crazy stuff. … All the signs were there, so they, they got rid of him.”
“Just crazy,” Medina said of the shooter’s past behavior at the school. “And we always was watching him, you know. Like, it was one of those kids that we always kept an eye on.”
Medina’s statement contradicts his claims in an interview last week. Speaking with the Sun Sentinel, Medina said he didn’t know the shooter and that school security personnel had not discussed him in the past. The Sentinel reports (shooter’s name redacted):
When reached on Wednesday, Medina disputed what he told investigators while under oath. He told a reporter that there was never a meeting identifying [the shooter] as a potential school shooter, he didn’t recognize [the shooter] specifically and he saw him arrive at the school from a distance of about two football fields.
Medina told investigators that he immediately rushed to the campus office and contacted resource officer Scot Peterson. Medina said he heard gun shots but was unsure where they were coming from. The two men then rushed to Building 12.
“I heard 15 bangs,” said Medina. “And it was loud. Like, you could kind of feel the percussion coming out of that building, the echo coming out of the door of the building. … It was kind of surreal.” Medina added that Peterson told him they have “a shooter on campus.”
That statement also contradicts the claim by Peterson, the only armed security on the campus, who said he was unsure if the gunfire was coming from inside the building, part of his excuse for not entering to confront the gunman.
As the Herald underscores, Medina’s testimony about how much of a threat school personnel knew the shooter to be provides more evidence of what has become increasingly clear: “School officials long knew about [the shooter’s] bouts of rage, obsession with weapons and Nazi imagery and violent outbursts against fellow students. [The shooter] was also assigned to a controversial program that diverts troubled students to alternative schools over the criminal-justice system — critics contend the program encourages a culture of lax discipline.”
That “controversial program” is the Obama-era, Sheriff Scott Israel-touted PROMISE program, which, as the National Review explains, “was intended to thin out the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ by providing counseling and other therapy for students who committed any on a list of 13 misdemeanors.” Israel initially claimed that the shooter was not connected to the program, but it was soon after revealed that the shooter was assigned to the diversion program in 2013 but never showed up.
Despite all the red flags, the shooter was never arrested and his obvious mental health problems were never adequately addressed.
The newly-released testimony has sparked outrage and dismay, including from the NRA’s Dana Loesch, who was infamously labeled a “murderer” for her support of the Second Amendment and the NRA at CNN’s Parkland town hall (h/t Twitchy):