'It was my job, & I didn't find him': Stoneman Douglas resource officer remains haunted by massacre

By Eli Saslow
June 4 at 6:00 AM

BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. — Scot Peterson had spent much of the past three months in hiding, but now somebody was walking onto his porch and toward the front door. A motion detector activated an alarm inside his duplex. Peterson, 55, ducked away from the windows and bent out of sight. His girlfriend, Lydia Rodriguez, walked to the entryway and began to pull down a corner of the white sheet that now covered most of their front door. “Oh please,” she said. “What now?”

It had been exactly 90 days since Peterson’s last shift as a school resource officer in Parkland, Fla., where he had been armed and on duty as 17 people were killed and 17 more were injured, and ever since then a procession had been making its way to his door to demand accountability for another American mass shooting. First came the Broward County Sheriff’s Office to repossess his police cruiser and his badge. Then came dozens of reporters and television trucks, jamming into the cul-de-sac of a retirement community to broadcast stories about the “Coward of Broward.” Then came a court officer serving Peterson with a lawsuit from a parent whose daughter had been fatally shot on the school’s third floor. “Scot Peterson is a coward,” it read. “Scot Peterson did nothing. Scot Peterson waited and listened to the din of screams of teachers and students, many of who were dead and dying. He let innocent people die.”

“I’m not here,” Peterson said now to Rodriguez as she looked out beyond the sheet and sunlight streamed into their living room. “It’s okay,” she said, waving at two octogenarians holding a bag of cookies on the porch. “It’s the neighbors. Jim and Kelly.”

Peterson invited them inside and offered them seats in the living room. Christian music played over the speakers and Fox News Channel was muted on television. “Thank God for you two,” Peterson told them. They were two of the only people who had come over after the shooting just to ask if he was okay. As the crowds grew outside his house, they had let him sneak out his back door and through their yard whenever he left to see his lawyer, visit a psychologist, or go for a drive when he couldn’t sleep.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/it-was-my-job-and-i-didnt-find-him-stoneman-douglas-resource-officer-remains-haunted-by-massacre/2018/06/04/796f1c16-679d-11e8-9e38-24e693b38637_story.html