The sprawling, ranch-style home in Coral Springs is nearly vacant now — Andrew Pollack and his wife, Julie, will be leaving for good in a couple of days, and there’s not even a chair for him to sit in during this interview — and when Pollack plays videos from his cell phone, they give off a hollow, distant echo that make the place sound haunted. Which, of course, it is.
Sirens. Static. “Shots fired! Shots fired!” The sounds crackle forth as a blurry set of images unspool on the phone’s screen. A roadway, then a locked car trunk, then a pair of hands, leisurely retrieving a vest that’s stenciled SHERIFF. A series of spinning, unstable views as the law officer — it’s now obvious this footage is from a cop’s body cam — shrugs the vest over his shoulders and fastens it. More pictures of hands moving onto and off of the camera. Ninety seconds have elapsed and the car trunk is still visible; the deputy has not moved an inch toward Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, a scene of terrible carnage.
And throughout that 90 seconds, a series of sharp retorts have sounded in the background of the video.
“Hear that? Hear those noises?” says Pollack, snapping the video off. “Those are gunshots. That’s my little girl being shot. That’s my little girl being murdered. While this deputy gets dressed. It took them 11 minutes to get to the hallway where she died.”