Parkland Families Angry Over Lack Of New Security

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL — Nearly six months since one of the worst school massacres in U.S. history, the families of Parkland victims slammed Broward County school officials Thursday for what they described as a lack of progress in implementing new school safety measures. Seventeen students and faculty members were killed by a lone gunman armed with an AR-15 assault rifle on Valentine's Day. The shooting took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

"We would like to make the citizens of Broward County aware that the current school board has failed to properly prepare the county's 234 schools for the upcoming school year, which begins next week," said a representative of the group speaking to reporters on Thursday. "The constant reversals of policy decisions continue to leave our county's students and teachers at risk and clearly show there is no unified plan to keep them safe."

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Meanwhile, Broward law enforcement officials released a transcript and police video conducted with the accused school shooter in the initial hours following the tragedy. Patch has agreed not to publish the accused shooter's name at the request of the families of victims.

Dressed in a hospital gown and in his bare feet, the accused shooter told a detective that he began hearing demons in his head around the time his father died in August of 2004. The voices became worse following the death of his mother from pneumonia last year. He also told the detective that he tried to take his own life twice, including once by consuming vodka and tequila and once by ingesting nearly an entire bottle of Advil two months before the massacre.

The families of Parkland victims called on voters to choose new school board members during the upcoming elections in which two parents of slain Parkland students are also candidates. Five of the nine Broward School Board seats are up for election on Nov. 6. The Florida primary election takes place on Aug. 28.

Hunter Pollack, whose sister Meadow Pollack was killed at the Parkland high school, said on social media Thursday that his family had filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Andrew Medina, an unarmed security monitor who was the first to encounter the shooter on the sprawling campus.

The families noted that a number of school districts elsewhere have already implemented security measures in the aftermath of the Parkland tragedy.

"Many acted quickly to protect the lives of students and teachers," the representative said. "This includes our neighbors just south of us in Miami-Dade where school safety plans were made and then completed. In Broward County, there has been no sense of urgency."

The families said that a school bond was approved by Broward County voters back in 2014 in the name of improved security.

"They have promised all of our schools will have a single point of entry, yet to date some 40 percent of the county schools lack this basic security feature," the representative said, adding that the board had not yet conducted an investigation into policies and procedures that may need to be changed as a result of the school shooting.

"In July, nearly five months after the mass shooting that took the lives of our children and our spouses, they finally hired an outside consultant to do an independent investigation — only to then terminate the investigation and fire the consultant just one week later," he explained. "We are forced to ask: How can they fix the deficient policies if they don't know what failed?"

Photo by Paul Scicchitano