Fox News has identified the Broward County Sheriff Captain who issued the “stage” and “perimeter” orders that kept officers outside of Stoneman Douglas High School as a school shooter was rampaging inside.
Captain Jan Jordan was in charge of Broward County deputies at the scene, law enforcement sources told Fox, and was the officer who instructed her colleagues to remain outside the scene of a mass shooting, even though department policies indicate that officers can enter such a scene to neutralize the shooter.
“Sources told Fox News it was Jordan giving the commands because they were recorded on the dispatch logs coming from Jordan’s radio insignia 17S1, or ‘Seventeen Sierra One,'” the news network reported.
A spokesperson for the Broward Sheriff’s Office would only confirm that “Captain Jordan asked if a perimeter had been established after the shooter left the building,” but would not say whether Jordan made the call because she had any further information about other law enforcement agencies on the scene, or whether she made a tragic mistake in assessing the situation inside Stoneman Douglas.
The spokesperson also wouldn’t say why Jordan “asked” for a perimeter; as the senior officer on the scene, her “request for information” would have been interpreted as an order.
According to documents obtained by Fox News from the Broward Sheriff’s Office, Jordan’s “perimeter” order was the first to go out to Broward County Sheriffs, who arrived on scene around 10 minutes after the shooter first opened fire: “at 2:32 p.m….the first command to form a perimeter was issued, ’17S1… NEED PERIMETER.’”
It would be another 15 minutes before a SWAT team finally entered the school. By then, the shooter was already on the run, having exited the building hidden in a crowd of fleeing students.
In the same document request, Fox News obtained a manual that instructs officers to enter a structure to preserve lives, and that a supervisor’s permission isn’t needed if officers believe people are at risk of injury or death. These instructions seem to run counter to earlier statements made by the Sheriff’s Department that officers were simply following procedure by not trying to neutralize the shooter inside the building.
Jordan, a 27-year veteran of the Broward County Sheriffs Department, has not yet spoken about the shooting. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel has so far refused to answer questions as to why his department remained outside Stoneman Douglas High School while other departments and emergency responders rushed inside to save students and teachers who had been shot.