Lots of unknowns, hard to make honest to gosh judgements. From my experience, most resource officers are not the "cream of the crop" of their department. They generally have the SRO position because it is basically a "PR" position where your biggest challenge is a food fight in the cafeteria. You deal with truancy, in school conflicts and generally assist when there is a canine search of the building/grounds. You report to Human Services if and when there is suspicion of abuse. IOWs, there's a reason they are not on the SWAT team. Over the years, I have seen several different SROs, in different local districts and have thought to myself "God help them if they ever have a school shooting". This shooting may(and I hope so) change the perspective of those in charge, of what a SRO really should be. We also do not know the protocol the school/school district has on active shooters. My district says no-one is required to re-enter the building(teachers and staff), altho many of us would do what we had to do to save innocent children. The evidence that the SRO actively tried to take command of the situation and did so calmly and with authority, makes me think, that while I don't agree, he thought it was the right thing to do. One thing many folks don't know is, most Schools have fire-doors that close automatically, so folks cannot re-enter the building once the alarm goes off. Most times there is only one entrance that can be re-entered once the alarm is pulled/activated. Schools don't care about the ease of saving the building by firefighters, only how easy it is for folks to get out and how hard it is for them to get back in during an actual fire. That entrance could have also been a city block away from where the deputy was.
That said, the school has an enrollment of about 3200 students. It is a newer school with high national academic ratings and probably had many of the most widely used security protocols implemented. Being the size of a small town, most students there probably did not know the shooter by name, or even by sight. The shear size of the school meant he could have made it to the other side of the building and in the panic, no one would have even suspected him as long as he acted the same as everyone else. Coming out of a building, a city block away from where the shootings happened while blending in with the rest of the escaping student body, would have been easy. Odds are it took that hour for him to be positively identified. Odds are we will really never know why he just stopped shooting and walked away. I'm just glad he did.
I'm not defending the deputy, only saying there are a lot of unanswered questions. I sit in school security meetings all the time. Teachers/staff claim they would act a certain heroic way every time and do so during drills. Funny tho, how when a real lock down is implemented for a legitimate reason, many of them act like deer in the headlights and are more concerned with calling their spouses on their cell phone, than thinking about the kids around them. The deputy has lost his job, his pension and his image. Odds are the best he can do after this is night security at Wal-Mart....if he's lucky. He will have to go over in his head everyday for the rest of his life if there was anything he could have done to save just one of those kids. It may be what he deserved, I don't know, but he didn't walk away unscathed.