WARNING: The following story contains graphic descriptions of gun violence and murder.
TO GET TO THE CABIN WHERE HE LIVES, you turn off the main road onto a dirt path, two tire tracks running through old-growth forest. The road dips, then forks right, up an embankment. Eventually you arrive at the foot of his gravel driveway, where he’s built a wooden shelter for the three bear-cub statues Lydia bought someplace, to protect them from the weather. A little project to keep him busy. There’s a new split-rail fence leading up to the house—he put that in, too—and he’s got an American flag in a bracket screwed into the trunk of a big oak.
The air is crisp and clean out here in the North Carolina woods, far away from any of the people who were there that day. And from the people who shouted in front of his home, made death threats against him, called him that stupid name, the coward of Broward. Called him much worse than that. The people who still don’t understand, because they don’t know the facts.
The truth is, no one understands. Well, Lydia does, of course, and it’s part of why she’s stuck with him all these years, even when she has to leave the bedroom in the middle of the night to cry so he can’t hear her. She was a teacher at the school for a long time, so she knows there was no way he could’ve ever got to that boy. She knows Scot was right where he should have been the whole time.
It was not your time, she tells him. You did not go into that building, because the shots you heard were outside, and it was divine intervention. It was not your time.
He appears from behind the storm door. Blue jeans, wire-framed glasses, a cop’s buzz cut. And immediately you see: It’s really him. Scot Peterson, the cop from the surveillance video. Valentine’s Day 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida. That same six-foot-five frame—a little huskier now, four years later, but the same lumbering figure. The whole world saw it: his grainy silhouette standing against a wall in the high school courtyard, behind the white pole. Not moving. Not appearing to do much of anything at all. When they showed it on the networks, they freeze-framed it and drew a circle around him, an armed officer just … standing there while those people were getting killed inside.
Here was the MSNBC analyst: “There does appear to be video of him, from a distance, leaning up against a wall, and clearly not going into the building….”
He’s 59. He mostly does projects around the house these days. Like the shelter for the bear-cub statues, and the outdoor kitchen he built around back. Expanded the front porch. Screened in the back deck. Anything, really, to keep his mind off the shooting and the people who think he’s a coward, and the fact that this fall, he will face the possibility of a trial under an obscure Florida law that hinges on whether he was a caregiver. They’re trying to say he was a caregiver for the more than 3,200 students at Stoneman Douglas, and if they can prove he was—which is a long shot, but still—then he could be charged with felony child neglect and could go to prison for a very long time.
Inside the cabin, there are photos of his own children. “My two boys, both were in the military,” Peterson says. “Well, one’s still in the military, in the Air Force. And my youngest son, he just finished the Navy. Matter of fact, he’s in Texas now. He did his tour and he’s now in Texas. I have my oldest daughter, she’s in nursing. She lives in Florida. And my second, she’s living with Mom. She’s graduated from FIU and still trying to get her feet wet.”
He sits by the fireplace. It was wood burning when they bought the house, but he’d. So they converted it to gas, and Peterson built a fence to hide the propane tank outside.
