As Mary Catherine Gingles was hunted down by her estranged husband brandishing a semiautomatic handgun equipped with a silencer, authorities say, several Broward Sheriff’s deputies were milling about just outside the Tamarac neighborhood where she and two others would be shot to death – waiting on orders to move.
Had the deputies rushed to the scene in the minutes after the first 911 call came in about gunshots in the neighborhood – which they are drilled to do in an active-shooter situation – Mary and the neighbor whose home she sought refuge in may be alive today, according to policing experts — and Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony.
“We had every opportunity to save that woman’s life,” Tony said.
Tony made the remarks at a Sept. 12 news conference announcing that eight BSO deputies had been fired — including a captain previously dismissed in May — for their bungled response to the multiple 911 calls on Feb. 16, the day of the murders. Tony also castigated the deputies for mishandling the 14 calls Mary made to BSO in the year leading up to her death, warning about her estranged husband Nathan Gingles’ increasingly dangerous behavior, which led their 4-year-daughter to tell her mother: “Daddy is trying to make you die.”
A Miami Herald review of almost 300 pages in the BSO investigation of the deputies’ actions detail catastrophic failures in responding to the early Sunday morning murders of the 34-year-old Mary, her 64-year-old father David Ponzer and Andrew Ferrin, the 36-year-old neighbor whose home Mary ran into as she darted from house to house seeking safety. The key findings: The sergeant in charge waffled. Deputies stood by idly. A fellow officer slammed them for not rushing in. A “lackadaisical” attitude permeated BSO’s Tamarac bureau…