Officials say Parkland school failed to follow security recommendations

The Parkland, Fla., high school that was the scene of a mass shooting in February did follow the advice of security experts prior to the incident, officials said Wednesday.

The man serving as the investigator for the state commission, Pinellas County Sheriff’s Detective Walter Bonasoro, said at a meeting that security experts twice told Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to use the measures, The Sun Sentinel reports.

They urged school officials to mark in each classroom what are called “hard corners,” which are areas safe from any fire from the classroom door.

The areas are at too harsh an angle for any shots fired from the door to hit those gathered there.

{mosads}Despite warnings, only two teachers in the building where the shooting took place had marked the hard corners.

And the corners in those rooms were too cluttered for students to crowd there during the shooting. 

During a meeting of the commission Wednesday, a father of one of the shooting’s victims asked if anyone died because of the failure to have marked, open hard corners.

“There were some, definitely,” said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who chairs the commission, the paper reports.

He said one girl was killed after she was “nudged out of a hard corner and couldn’t get in.”

Gualtieri added that there is no district wide policy requiring the use of hard corners.

According to The Miami Herald, he noted that the problem is “not unique just to MSD or to Broward county.”

In addition, it emerged at Wednesday’s meeting that the coach and school security monitor, Andrew Medina, didn’t stop Cruz after seeing him walk on campus with a rifle bag.

“He stated he believed he could not call a code red unless he physically saw the gun or heard gunshots,” Bonasoro said, the Sentinel reported.

“Despite hearing the gunshots, he still did not call the code red,” Bonasoro said. “Medina admitted he did not approach Cruz because he thought Cruz might have had a handgun that was readily accessible to him.”

Bonasoro and Gualtieri’s statements follow after reports emerged earlier this year that the school district fumbled the shooter’s special-needs assistance request.

This left him without any school counseling or other educational services in the 14 months leading up to the shooting.

Seventeen people were killed in the shooting and seven were wounded.