TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA)— It was near the end of the school day on Feb 14, 2018. The fire alarm went off, and the carnage began at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Students were crouched down inside classrooms, hiding in closets, and frantically running away.
Tactical teams surrounded the school while parents frantically texted their kids still barricaded inside.
Seventeen people were killed that day, including 14-year-old Gina Montalto.
“Our daughter Gina was a fantastic kid,” her father, Tony Montalto, said. “She was our first born.”
“She made us parents,” he continued. “She was a great big sister to her little brother Anthony.”
On the sixth anniversary of her death, Tony remembers his daughter as kind and compassionate.
“She was bright, and she was bubbly,” he said. “She was an integral part to our family, and we miss her everyday.”
“There was not enough done early on to mitigate the harm,” Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri explained. “Remember, there was 34 people who were shot and or killed in 3 minutes and 51 seconds.”
“That’s a lot of people in a very short amount of time,” he added.
So what went wrong and what’s being done to fix it?
Sheriff Gualtieri serves as the chair of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, specifically created in 2018 to answer those questions.
He said the first thing that failed was communication.
“People saw the shooter and they realized, as they said, ‘There was a crazy boy carrying a rifle, an AR-15,'” Sheriff Gualtieri said. “But they had no way to communicate the threat to others.”
Next up, surveillance, something he told 8 On Your Side significantly delayed treatment for the people who were shot but still barricaded inside.
“They had a video system at that school that day that nobody knew how to use,” he said. “It wasn’t until 20 minutes later that they realized, oh well the shooter isn’t here anymore and we can actually go and send ems in and rescue people and provide medical care.”
A school safety bill has been passed in the Florida legislature every year since the mass shooting.
On Wednesday, yet another school safety bill passed it’s final stop in the Florida House of Representatives.
“All access points to campuses, all the gates be closed and locked at all times,” Sheriff Gualtieri said of the potential impact of the bill. “That was one of the biggest vulnerabilities at Stoneman Douglas because the shooter got out of that Uber on Pine Island Road and unlocked open gate unfettered access.”
Where did the shooter go from there? The sheriff said to an unlocked door, yet another thing this bill addresses, as it would require all building doors to be closed and locked.
“Probably one of the most significant and impactful requirements to come out of this bill is that every single student instructional space have a safe area identified in that room and that’s one of the tragedies at Stoneman Douglas is a whole lot of kids got shot and killed because they couldn’t get into the safest space or hard corner of that classroom,” he said.
You can read the bill in it’s entirety below.
But even with all of these changes, Sheriff Gualtieri said the best way to stay protected is acknowledging it could happen to you.
“Probably one of the greatest vulnerabilities to school safety is the erroneous notion that it’s not going to happen to me, it’s not going to happen here and it’s not going to happen at my school,” he said. “There is no profile for the next shooter.”
“We have indicators of similar traits, similar characteristics, similar reasons why they do it, but it can be anybody anytime any place,” he continued. “That was certainly the case in parkland because the city of parkland where Stoneman Douglas is located, was named the safest city in the state of Florida by the chamber of commerce a couple of days before the shooting.”
“People really thought that kind of stuff couldn’t happen in their community, it happens elsewhere,” he said.
He and Montalto are still fighting for change six years later, and honoring the people like Gina who were senselessly killed.
“It’s important, especially on the anniversary to remember who they were before the shooting, students all with bright futures, big smiles,” Montalto explained. “The staff members who were taken that day, coaches who gave themselves to the community.”
“It should inspire us all who are still here to live to work with them, to work with their legacy, and ensure that a tragedy like this never happens again,” he added.
