'Every day I live it,' Andrew Pollack says of the school shooting about one year ago that left his 17-year-old daughter Meadow dead.

From the steps of his camper, Andrew Pollack can see the cars speed by on University Drive. In the blur, he seems to stand still. Until not too long ago, he lived in a house close to this empty Coral Springs lot. He played lacrosse every week, worked out at the gym twice a day, enjoyed the life of a dad and a newlywed, kept politics at bay.

Today is different. He’s a nationally recognized advocate for school safety, a father who has corralled his grief into a mission to remove certain local officials from office, who gets an invite from the former governor to the president’s State of the Union address. Today, Pollack’s name is synonymous with Parkland.

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Home is this camper that sits on a lot across from his temple, Chabad of Coral Springs. He lives here with his wife, Dr. Julie Phillips Pollack, an emergency room physician, and their 2-year-old Belgian Malinois, Sonny. The wheels on the 4-by-4 truck that anchors their Eagle Cap camper home are a symbol of Pollack’s every intention to escape Broward County, its “unethical Democrat” politicians and the “sick, demented” people who support them.

The camper is ready to go. “But I can’t seem to get anywhere because I’m always back here, fighting these people,” says Pollack. “It’s a battle. I feel I have this weight on my shoulders.”

Yes, today may be different, but it is also the same, says Pollack. While a community struck with the horror of last year’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School will mark the Feb. 14 anniversary with memorials, Pollack says the day will be indistinguishable from any other of the past year. His 18-year-old daughter Meadow, the youngest of Pollack’s three children, was one of 17 people massacred that day, killed shortly after accused shooter Nikolas Cruz took an Uber to campus, walked through an unlocked gate with a rifle bag and rampaged through the halls.

>PHOTO GALLERY: The day 17 died at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High

“Every day is the same day,” says Pollack. “Every day is February 14th. I don’t need February 14th to remind me that’s the day my daughter was murdered. Every day, I live it.”

At 53, Pollack is the portrait of a man in mourning. He is seated on a camping chair in a somber navy jacket, gray dress slacks and black dress shoes, a reserved look interrupted only by the absence of socks. During a wide-ranging conversation, he doesn’t smile once.

“I haven’t smiled since my daughter was murdered. I just can’t do it. You can’t enjoy yourself anymore in life,” he says, gazing across the rocky lot. “And it was the most avoidable shooting in the country’s history. Everyone has been affected by this and they’ll never be the same.”

'They killed my daughter;

I have to expose these people'

But Pollack is more than a grieving father. He’s a grieving father with a plan -- and an enemies list.

“I’m a changed guy. They killed my daughter,” he says. “I have to expose these people first before I can get any sort of peace in my life. And I’m doing it. One by one, I’m going to finish these people off.”

The top spot on Pollack’s must-go list: Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie. Pollack accuses the schools chief of lenient policies he believes contributed to the events of Feb. 14, 2018.

It was a culture of leniency that allowed a campus monitor named Andrew Medina to be in charge of the school’s gate that afternoon, says Pollack. Four months before the shooting, a schools disciplinary committee had recommended firing the 39-year-old Medina after complaints of sexual harassment from students, but the district’s human resources chief gave him a three-day suspension instead.

After the shooting, the campus monitor, who was also an assistant baseball coach, told investigators he had left the gate unlocked and unattended. He said he recognized the gunman who was “beelining” toward a building filled with hundreds of students, but didn’t know his name. “Crazy Boy” is how Medina referred to Cruz, a former student expelled a year earlier for threatening behavior.

“I knew who the kid was because 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 told Broward Sheriff’s Office detectives in a videotaped interview.

But the unarmed monitor didn’t call a “Code Red,” the call that would have alerted teachers and school authorities to lock classroom doors. By the time the first Code Red call came that day, investigators found, the gunman had shot 24 people.

Meadow, a high school senior who planned to attend Lynn University and dreamed of being a lawyer, was shot nine times, four times as she tried to escape into a classroom and five more times as she made a futile attempt to shield another student. (That student also was killed.) It was only later that her father would learn Meadow was one of the students who had accused Medina of harassment. (She was 17 at the time.) Pollack also would learn a second campus monitor, David Taylor, hid in a janitor’s closet during the shooting.

“What kills me is if they would have done their jobs, you might have had someone at the gate with a half a brain,” says Pollack. “My dog, Sonny, would have done a better job at the gate, of not letting that kid walk in with a rifle bag. Can you imagine living with that? That they let him work at the gate, after he was found guilty of harassing the girls and one of the girls was my daughter? And I didn’t even know? That’s something that kills me. The guy shouldn’t have been at the gate, and they let that idiot at the gate.”

Pollack says he was stunned to learn the campus monitors were allowed to return to their jobs after the massacre.

“No one lost their jobs for leaving the gates open. That would have been something. That would have been holding people accountable,” he says.

It wasn’t until the sheriff’s office interview transcript was published four months later that the two men were reassigned. Several months after that, they were fired.

Medina got a coaching job with a local youth travel league. On Wednesday, Pollack confronted him at a Pine Trails Park ballfield and heckled Medina, according to a document filed in Broward Circuit court. The father yelled at Medina: "I'm not through with you yet," the document stated.

The coach is pursuing a restraining order.

For Pollack, the details of how the schools dealt with Medina amount to a failed system. It’s a system he wants to escape, but one he says he feels obligated to fight.

“Instead of being able to grieve as parents that have lost our kids, we’re in a battle against unethical politicians in Broward,” he says. “Instead of just being able to move on with our lives, we can’t. We’re left with a battle against these people. And it’s a battle every day.”

The war analogy seems appropriate for a man who has taken a tactical approach to his search for justice. His battle plan includes a wrongful death lawsuit against several people and institutions with ties to the school and the accused shooter. Among the defendants: Scot Peterson, a sheriff’s deputy who served as school resource officer -- he was the only other armed person on campus, but took cover instead of confronting the gunman. The estate of Cruz’s mother, Lynda Cruz. The couple Cruz lived with at the time of the shooting, James and Kimberly Snead. Plus, three mental health institutes.

Pollack’s battle plan includes his upcoming book, “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created Parkland's Shooter and Endanger America's Students,” to be published June 25 by Post Hill, an independent publisher of books distributed by Simon and Schuster.

Praise for President Trump,

support for Scott

His strategy also includes politics, namely supporting conservative Republican politicians. He praises President Donald Trump for establishing a school safety commission that called for a voluntary program to arm school personnel and for urging a rollback on Obama-era, school-discipline policies that sought to ease racial disparity. Pollack applauds former Gov. Rick Scott, who appointed him to the Florida Board of Education shortly before leaving Tallahassee. Pollack lost the position when incoming Gov. Ron DeSantis scrapped Scott’s last-minute appointments, but says he is confident he will be reinstated.

Pollack acknowledges he is far more partisan now than he was before the shooting.

“I didn’t give two sh--- about politicians. But when you look into it, at the end of every entity in Broward that failed there’s an unethical Democrat,” says Pollack, who equates Democratic policies with lack of school safety. “We want to know that when we drop our kids off at school, that we can pick them up at the end of the day. I just want our schools safe, so that makes me a Republican. I own up to it. I’m as Republican as they come.”

Pollack’s older son, Hunter Pollack, says his father’s work has helped spark his own involvement in civic and political efforts. At 21, the Florida State University student is an intern with the governor’s office. After his sister’s death, he took up studies in criminology and political science and joined DeSantis’ public safety transition advisory committee. Today, he says, the role he’s most proud of is being his father’s “right-hand man.”

“My father has been the most successful figure and parent to come out of Parkland. He has stayed on message,” says the son. “I think you can measure my sister’s legacy by his work.”

Pollack’s rabbi, Avraham Friedman, describes the father’s focus as “unwavering.”

“He took this pain and he’s just channeling it and is deeply committed to making sure this doesn’t happen to any other child,” says Friedman, executive director at the Chabad of Coral Springs and a longtime family friend.

'Not holding people accountable

a form of letting evil prosper'

Friedman likens Pollack’s quest for justice to a passage in the Book of Deuteronomy that calls for eradicating evil.

“Not holding people or systems accountable is a form of letting evil prosper. By eradicating the system that allows something so tragic to happen, you can bring goodness and kindness in the world,” says the rabbi. “Obviously the gunman holds the most responsibility, end of story. But having said that, in (Pollack’s) belief, certain people dropped the ball. If the system allows for innocent people to be murdered in such a horrendous way, there’s no ambiguity over here -- the system is evil.”

That said, Pollack had no intention of getting involved in politics, says the rabbi.

“This is not something he was looking to do. He wasn’t involved in politics. He really wanted to go to a quiet place. He loves nature and open areas of the United States,” says Friedman. “But he has been very effective, a leader. He has a very clear vision of what he believes and of the failures that led to this tragedy.”

Parkland survivors and the school’s bereaved parents have dealt with loss in a range of ways, from civic action to legal action. (There are more than 100 pending lawsuits related to Parkland.) Some survivors and parents have become advocates for progressive causes like gun control. Not Pollack. He says focusing on guns is a waste of time.

“Anyone who’s going to get into a gun debate, all you do is deflect from doing what we can do together. And that’s fix the schools and make them safe. A gun debate is a distraction,” says Pollack, who describes himself as “not pro-gun or anti-gun.”

What he does endorse is allowing guns at school — in well-trained hands.

“The average shooting takes four minutes. No one can get there in time to save the kids,” says Pollack, who favors an extensive, tactical program that would train teachers and other school employees on the use of firearms in an active shooter situation. “Liberals go nuts and say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna arm teachers.’ It’s not about arming teachers. It’s voluntary.”

He believes such a training program should be open to all school personnel, “I don’t care if it’s the lunch lady,” if they can pass the rigorous course.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea. Whoever doesn’t think it’s wonderful, I wish they’d put themselves in my daughter’s shoes when she was on that third floor, waiting for someone to save her after she was already shot four times, praying for her life that someone was there to help her. And no one was there,” he says. “So if a teacher might have been there — a teacher, a janitor, a lunch lady, a gym teacher — would have been trained and would have been in that building, they could have stopped him and saved my daughter’s life.”

'I see her all day long.

She's in my head'

Instead, he says, he’s left with memories of the girl he called “Princess.”

“I can’t even tell you the pain I have every day. And these scumbags that let this happen. It’s not just the shooter. People tell me, ‘Oh, we only can blame the shooter.’ But I can’t just blame him because he was a screaming red flag, that kid, from when he was in kindergarten. And they allowed him to go to school with my daughter. And then they allowed all the failures,” he says.

This is the scenario Pollack wants to leave behind him.

“I sold my house. I can’t live in a county that’s this toxic. I just can’t do it,” says Pollack, who describes his future plans as “living week to week.” Long-term plans, however, do not involve staying in Broward, he says. “You’ve got to have your head examined to move into a Democratic county like Broward.”

When he does look back, he does so to remember Meadow.

“I’ve got a little video I watch, a medley of her pictures I put together and watch whenever I need to get empowered,” he says. “But I see her all day long. She’s in my head. She’s telling me to expose these people and keep fighting.”

lbalmaseda@pbpost.com

Watch + Listen: Below, Palm Beach Post journalist Liz Balmaseda talks about what's changed in Florida schools after Parkland, stating, "I think Florida has become more militant because of this... You have the kids who have become very militant when it has to do with the gun debate. And then there are other people... like the parent that I profiled, whose militancy has taken a completely different approach. I really zoomed in on one area, with one parent, and it was just kind of heartbreaking really to hear him speak and to hear him recount that day." .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }