If you wondered whether the tragic story of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas school murders in Parkland, Florida could get more frustrating, CBSNews reports that it has.
According to CBS, Andrew Medina, one of the “security guards” who had been tasked with keeping unarmed students and staff safe at the school, not only did not do his job, he was suspended last year for sexually harassing two female students. One of those girls, a student named Meadow Pollack, subsequently died at the hands of the shooter who apparently was allowed into the school by the “guard."
The girl’s father, Andrew Pollack, told reporters, "Every day, more incompetence gets exposed. [Medina] should have been fired a long time ago."
Strangely, the school district issued a statement claiming that they did not fire Medina at the time of the accusations because he had no previous disciplinary record, adding he'd denied the accusations and that “there was no direct evidence to distinguish between the conflicting statements provided by the student and the employee."
But there were two accusers. And, as CBS reports:
According to records obtained by the South Florida SunSentinel, Medina, who is also an assistant baseball coach, asked one girl to go on a date and another said he made lewd comments to her and said he wanted to visit her at work. Broward County Schools investigators say one of the students' stories was corroborated by surveillance video of Medina approaching her in a hallway on Feb. 16, 2017.
And there’s much more:
According to Andrew and Hunter (Meadow’s brother) Pollack, Meadow was one of the girls. They said Medina would call Meadow, then 17, 'beautiful and sweetheart,' making her uncomfortable. They say that when her boyfriend confronted Medina, Medina threatened him. Meadow and her mother then reported Medina, they said.
Can the tower of government incompetence rise any higher?
Lest one forget, as Robby Soave notes in Reason:
On the day of the shooting, Medina was the first school official to spot (Nicholas) Cruz—who was no longer welcome at the school, and known to be a threat. He did not confront Cruz, and apparently failed to realize that Cruz was armed. He took no action, other than radioing another unarmed security guard, David Taylor, to inform him that Cruz was headed his way. When the shooting started, Taylor hid in a janitor's closet, according to The Sun Sentinel. He was initially reassigned as well, but has now been fired.
Medina was not armed, unlike school resource officer Scot Peterson. But not only did Medina not attempt to confront the shooter even without a weapon, he didn't even put in a "code red" call.
In fact, in an investigative interview just made public, Medina noted that they already knew Cruz was a problem. As CBS reports:
We had a meeting about him last year, and we said, 'If there's gonna be anybody who's gonna come to this school and shoot this school up, it's gonna be that kid,'
This level of incompetence is hard to fathom, let alone accept. If a private school had exhibited this kind of behavior, not only would parents be pulling their kids from the system, the school likely would be ready to shut down. Yet the school district will receive more tax money next year than it did last year.
Nothing can bring back the lost lives, but at least politicians could stop forcing people to pay for the system – from the police to the schools -- that messed up time and time again. When it comes to Broward County, the term “adding insult to injury” is insufficient. Death makes it so.
But the insults just keep coming.