More than a year ago, tips about online posts threatening a school shooting led Georgia police to interview a 13-year-old boy, but investigators didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest.
On Wednesday, that boy opened fire at his high school outside Atlanta, killing four people and wounding nine, authorities said. The teen has been charged as an adult in the deaths of Apalachee High School students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and instructors Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference.
At least nine other people — eight students and a teacher at the school in Winder, about an hour’s drive northeast of Atlanta — were taken to hospitals with injuries. All were expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.
The teen, now 14, is scheduled to be transferred to a regional juvenile detention center on Thursday. Armed with an assault rifle, the teen pointed the gun at students in a school hallway when his classmates refused to open the door for him to return to his algebra classroom, classmate Lyela Sayarath said.
The teen had earlier left the second-period algebra classroom and Sayarath thought the quiet student who recently transferred was skipping school again. But he returned later and wanted to go back to the classroom.
Some students went to open the locked door but backed away. “I guess they saw something, but for some reason they didn’t open the door,” Sayarath said. When he looked through a window in the door, he saw the student turn around and heard a burst of gunfire. “It was about 10 or 15 of them at a time, in a row,” he said.
The math students crouched on the floor and sporadically crawled around, looking for a safe corner to hide in. Two school resource officers encountered the shooter within minutes of a report of shots fired, Hosey said.
The teen immediately turned himself in and was taken into custody. The teen had been interviewed after the FBI received anonymous tips in May 2023 about online threats to commit an unspecified school shooting, the agency said in a statement. The FBI downgraded the threats and referred the case to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, adjacent to Barrow County.
The sheriff’s office interviewed the then-13-year-old boy and his father, who said there were hunting weapons in the home but the teen did not have unsupervised access to them. The teen also denied making online threats. The sheriff’s office alerted local schools to continue monitoring the teen, but there was no probable cause for arrest or further action, the FBI said.
Hosey said the state Division of Family and Children Services also had prior contact with the teen and will investigate whether that has any connection to the shooting.
Local media reported that law enforcement searched the teen’s family home in Bethlehem, Georgia, east of the high school on Wednesday. “All the students who had to watch their teachers and classmates die, the ones who had to limp out of school, they seemed traumatized,” Sayarath said, “That’s the consequence of not taking control.”
Authorities were still investigating how the teenager obtained the gun used in the shooting and smuggled it into the school of about 1,900 students in Barrow County, a rapidly suburbanizing area on the edge of the sprawling Atlanta metropolitan area.
It was the latest of dozens of school shootings in the United States in recent years, including particularly deadly shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas.
The classroom killings have sparked heated debates over gun control and have unnerved parents whose children grow up accustomed to active shooter drills in the classroom.
But they have done little to change the nation’s gun laws. As of Wednesday, there had been 29 mass killings in the United States so far this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.
At least 127 people have died in those killings, which are defined as incidents in which four or more people are killed within a 24-hour period, not including the killer (the same definition used by the FBI). On Wednesday night, hundreds of people gathered at Jug Tavern Park in downtown Winder for a vigil.
Volunteers handed out candles as well as water, pizza and tissues. Some knelt as a Methodist minister led the crowd in prayer after a Barrow County commissioner read a Jewish prayer for mourning.
Christopher Vasquez, 15, said he attended the vigil because he needed to feel grounded and be in a safe place. He was rehearsing with the band when the lockdown order was issued. He said it felt like a normal drill as students lined up to hide in the band closet. “Once we heard banging on the door and the SWAT (team) came to get us out, that’s when I knew it was serious,” he said.
“I just started shaking and crying.” She eventually calmed down once she was at the football stadium. “I was just praying that everyone I love was safe,” she said.
Connect with the Voice of America! Subscribe to our channels YouTube, WhatsApp and the newsletter. Activate notifications and follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Add Comment