The former sheriff’s deputy who was widely criticized for his actions during a mass shooting that left 17 dead at a Florida high school said in an interview scheduled to air Tuesday morning that he would have “been in the building in a heartbeat” knowing what he now knows.
Scot Peterson will break his silence during a two-part interview on NBC’s “Today Show.”
In a video released by NBC, anchor Savannah Guthrie asked Peterson if he would acknowledge that “he missed it” by standing outside the building as a gunman fired an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle into classrooms.
Peterson tells Guthrie he “lives with that.”
“In the perfect world, I would have said, ‘Oh yeah, I know there’s a shooter in there; let me go to the third floor, find this person,” he tells Guthrie.
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Those are my kids,” he adds. “It’s just – I didn’t know.”
Peterson retired from the Broward Sheriff’s Office after surveillance video showed him outside the building where the shooting occurred. He never confronted the shooter.
—With files from Global News