Among the newly released recordings of 911 calls from deadly Florida school shooting, the parents of a 17-year-old girl can be heard telling a dispatcher that their daughter is texting from a classroom where the door's glass was shot out. "Three shot in her room. Oh my God. Oh my God," the mother says, raising her voice.
The material includes 10 of the 81 recordings of frantic calls by students and parents.
The excerpts show a deputy on school grounds first thought the loud bangs were firecrackers, then realized they were gunshots - yet he never ran toward them. Other responding deputies and officers desperately tried to sort through a chaotic scene, treat the injured, lock down the school and locate the shooter.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed a school safety bill passed by the Legislature in response to the Valentine's Day mass shooting that killed 17 people at a high school.
The bill signed Friday falls short of what Scott and the shooting's survivors wanted. It also marks Scott's break with the National Rifle Association.
It raises the minimum age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, extends a three-day waiting period for handgun purchases to include long guns and bans bump stocks that allow guns to mimic fully automatic fire. It also creates a so-called "guardian" program that enables teachers and other school employees to carry handguns.
Student activists from the school where the shooting took place followed the bill's track closely and called it "a baby step."
The NRA opposes raising age limits to buy weapons or imposing new waiting periods. In a statement Thursday, NRA and Unified Sportsmen of Florida lobbyist Marion Hammer called the bill "a display of bullying and coercion" that would violate Second Amendment rights and punish law-abiding citizens.
Teachers, meanwhile, called on Scott to use his line-item veto power to zero out the $67 million set aside for the program to train and arm school employees. The Florida Education Association on Thursday sent a letter to Scott saying the only people who should have guns in schools need to be trained law enforcement.
The governor, who is expected to seek a U.S. Senate seat later this year, has called for raising the minimum age to purchase any type of gun, but he does not support arming teachers. Instead, he wanted lawmakers to adopt his own $500 million proposal to put at least one law enforcement officer in every school.
Andrew Pollack, whose daughter was among those killed, said more needed to be done, but there's enough good in the bill that it should pass.
"My precious daughter Meadow's life was taken, and there's nothing I can do to change that. But make no mistake: I'm a father, and I'm on a mission. I'm on a mission to make sure I'm the last dad to ever read a statement of this kind."
The suspect in the attack, Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student, faces 17 counts of first-degree murder and 17 counts of attempted murder for the massacre.
Cruz's public defender has said he will plead guilty if prosecutors take the death penalty off the table and sentence him to life in prison instead. Prosecutors have not announced a decision.
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