Boy, 14, charged with killing two students and two teachers in US school shooting
Colt Gray was interviewed by the Sheriff's office a year ago in connection with online threats about school shootings, as David Harper reports
A 14-year-old boy was charged with killing two students and two teachers in a school shooting in Georgia, United States on Wednesday.
Two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, along with maths teachers Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie, were killed at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
At least nine other people, eight students and one teacher, were taken to hospitals with injuries, but are all expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff said.
The suspected gunman, Colt Gray, is in custody and was a student at the school, US authorities confirmed.
Gray will be charged with murder and tried in court as an adult.
Student Lyela Sayarath said the suspect left the classroom at the beginning of their algebra class at around 9.45am.
When he returned near the end of the class, he knocked to get back in. Another student went to open the door, but Lyela said that the student noticed the gun and didn’t open the door.
She said the shooter went to the classroom next door and opened fire.
The gun used in the shooting was an AR-12-style rifle, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation director.
“I heard gunshots outside my classroom and people screaming, people begging not to get shot,” another student described.
“And then people sitting beside me were just shaking and crying.”
The local sheriff’s department received the first reports of the shooting around 10.20am and arrived soon after, along with two school resource officers already assigned to the school.
One resource officer confronted the shooter, who surrendered immediately and was taken into custody, police said.
Apalachee High School has about 1,900 students. As a precaution, all schools in the Barrow County School System were placed on lockdown, and police were sent to all district high schools, but no further incidents were reported.
A helicopter was also seen airlifting wounded people to hospital.
US officials told CNN that the school had received a phone threat before Wednesday morning's incident. Officers are investigating who made the call.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said there was no evidence of other schools being targeted. But investigators are pursuing “any leads of any potential associates of the shooter that was involved in this incident".
In May 2023, the suspect was interviewed by law enforcement after receiving anonymous tips about online threats to carry out a school shooting, FBI Atlanta said.
The FBI narrowed the threats down and the sheriff’s office interviewed the then-13-year-old and his father, who said there were hunting guns in the house but the teen did not have unsupervised access to them. The teen denied making any online threats.
Local schools were alerted for monitoring, but there was no probable cause for arrest or further action, the FBI said.
Reacting to the incident, Kamala Harris called the shooting a "senseless tragedy".
She said: “It’s just outrageous that every day in our country, in the United States of America, that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive."
“We’ve got to stop it,” she continued, adding that “it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Erin Clark, the mother of a student in his final year at the school, said her son heard eight or nine gunshots before barricading his classroom door.
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In a statement on social media, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp urged “all Georgians to join my family in praying for the safety of those in our classrooms, both in Barrow County and across the state”.
President Joe Biden has been briefed on the incident, the White House said, offering federal support to state and local officials.
The US has suffered at least 385 mass shootings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as those in which four or more victims are shot.
Schools in the county will be closed for the week while the investigation takes place.
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