A security guard who spotted the gunman in the Parkland school shooting but didn’t stop him was almost fired last year after two female students accused him of sexual harassment.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel reports that a discipline committee recommended firing Andrew Medina, but instead he was suspended for only three days.
The discipline followed an internal investigation into allegations that the 39-year-old Medina had sexually harassed two teenage girls, in which he was accused of asking one of them on a date and whispering to the other, “You are fine as f**k.”
At least one of the students’ claims was substantiated using security camera footage that showed Medina walking toward her in a hallway.
“Both students became so uncomfortable with Mr. Medina’s comments and actions, they sought out different routes to their classes in an attempt to avoid him,” an investigative report reads.
One of the girls was Meadow Pollack, who was killed in the Feb. 14 mass shooting. Pollack’s family members said they became aware of the harassment after she died.
“If this had been brought to my attention back then, he would have never been at the school” on the day of the massacre, Pollack’s father, Andrew, said of Medina.
Andrew, who called his daughter “beautiful” and a “sweetheart,” said Medina “should have been fired a long time ago.”
Medina received only a suspension because he refuted the harassment allegations and had not been disciplined previously. The school district also said there was no way to assess the competing claims between him and the girls.
Medina, who worked as an unarmed security monitor as well as a JV baseball coach, had spotted the alleged shooter, Nikolas Cruz, with a duffel bag and backpack. Medina told a fellow security monitor that someone suspicious was on school premises, but that other guard hid in a closet, the newspaper reports.
School officials have since prohibited Medina from entering school property after concluding that he should have placed the school on lockdown when he saw Cruz.
“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,’” Medina said in an interview with investigators.
A Broward County Schools spokeswoman told USA TODAY that both Medina and Taylor “have received administrative reassignments away from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School until further notice.”
[Feature Photo: Andrew Medina/Broward County Sheriff’s Office]