After a shooting at a Georgia high school left four people dead and nine injured, a 14-year-old kid will be charged with murder.
The incident at Apalachee High School in Winder, Barrow County, on Wednesday, resulted in the deaths of two students and two instructors, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
According to an official, two officers detained Colt Grey, a student at the institution. His trial will take place in adult court.
It has surfaced that he was interviewed by the FBI last year following tips from anonymous sources regarding threats to carry out a school shooting, but at the time, no arrests were made.
The shooting at the 1,900-student school was reported to the police for the first time at approximately 10:20 local time (14:20 GMT).
Jud Smith, the local sheriff, called the incident “pure evil”.
“Within minutes law enforcement was on the scene, as well as two school resource officers assigned to the school who immediately encountered the subject,” the sheriff said in a news conference.
“The subject immediately surrendered. He gave up and got on the ground. And the officers took him into custody.”
No motive has been established, according to officials, and law enforcement is not aware of “any targets at this point”.
The FBI claims that when they visited the suspect in May 2023, they spoke with both him and his father over threats that were made online, including images of guns.
“The father stated that he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them,” the FBI said in a statement.
Authorities “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject” after the suspect, who was 13 years old at the time, denied making the threats online.
“At the time, there was no probable cause for an arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels.”
According to local media WSB-TV, 14-year-old autistic Mason Schermerhorn was among those slain on Wednesday.
After they were unable to locate Mason, his family uploaded his picture to social media, where they subsequently purportedly verified he had not survived the incident.
According to his family’s social media posts, teacher and coach David Phenix was shot in the foot and hip, breaking his hip bone.
A person on Facebook claiming to be his daughter said that he had surgery but was in a stable condition.
How many shots were fired and what kind of weapon was used have not been disclosed by law authorities.
When the suspect was taken into jail, Sheriff Smith stated, he was interviewed and conversed with investigators.
“This is going to take multiple days for us to get answers as to what happened and why this happened,” he told reporters.
Following the school shooting, dozens of police officers moved quickly to put it under lockdown, clean it, and transport the students to a neighbouring football stadium before releasing them to their families.
According to Lyela Sayarath, a student of the suspected assailant, the suspect departed the room at the start of their mathematics lesson, as reported by CNN.
She claimed that when he returned and banged on the door—which had shut on its own—another student saw that he was armed and turned him away.
The perpetrator then moved to the classroom next door, where he started firing, Ms. Sayarath said to CNN.
Second-year student Alexsandra Romero reported that she was seated in class when someone stormed in and yelled at the pupils, telling them to get down.
“I can just remember my hands were shaking,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I felt bad because everybody was crying, everybody was trying to find their siblings.
“I can still picture everything, like the blood, the shouting.”
Just before the shooting, 14-year-old Marques Coleman claimed to have seen the assailant brandishing a “big gun.”
“I got up, I started running, he started shooting like, like 10 times. He shot at least 10 times,” he told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.
“My teacher started barricading the door with desks,” he said.
The student reported that he observed “one of my classmates on the ground bleeding so bad” after getting up, and that a friend had been shot in the stomach and another lady had been wounded in the leg.
In an interview with X, formerly Twitter, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp stated he was “praying for the safety of those in our classrooms” and that he was providing “all available state resources” to help.
Democratic nominee for vice president in the White House, Kamala Harris, described the massacre as “a senseless tragedy” while speaking at a rally in New Hampshire.
“It’s just outrageous that every day in our country… that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether their child will come home alive.
“It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Republican White House candidate Donald Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social: “These cherished children were taken from us far too soon by a sick and deranged monster.”
The US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, stated that federal agents were assisting with the investigation.
