A 14-year-old boy has killed two fellow students and two teachers and wounded nine others in a shooting at a Georgia high school in the United States.
The incident which occurred on Wednesday, September 4, 2024, was the first mass campus shooting since the start of the school year.
The 14-year-old boy, who had been interviewed by law enforcement last year over online threats about committing a school shooting, was taken into custody shortly after the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, investigators said.
He was identified as Colt Gray and will be charged and tried as an adult, Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, told a press conference on Thursday.
Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said the gunman, armed with an “AR platform style weapon,” or semiautomatic rifle, was quickly confronted by deputies assigned to the school and that the suspect immediately got on the ground and surrendered.
Once under arrest, the suspect was speaking with investigators, who believe he was acting alone, but they declined to say if they knew what motivated him.
Officials identified those killed as two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and two teachers, Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53. All nine of those hospitalised were expected to recover, Smith told reporters.
“Pure evil did what happened today,” Smith added.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation later issued a statement revealing that it had investigated online threats to commit a school shooting in 2023 and local law enforcement interviewed a 13-year-old subject and his father in nearby Jackson County. The statement did not identify the teen, but Georgia officials said the statement was in connection to the subject in custody.
“The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online. Jackson County alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject,” Reuters quoted the FBI as saying, adding that there was no probable cause to make an arrest.
The shooting revived both the national debate about gun control and the outpouring of grief that follows in a country where such outbursts occur with some regularity.
People in Winder, a city of 18,000 some 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Atlanta, gathered in a park for a prayer vigil on Wednesday night.
Some leaned on each other or bowed their heads in prayer, while others lit candles to honor the dead.
The White House said in a statement that President Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting “and his administration will continue coordinating with federal, state, and local officials as we receive more information.”
“Jill and I are mourning the deaths of those whose lives were cut short due to more senseless gun violence and thinking of all of the survivors whose lives are forever changed,” Biden said in a statement, calling on Republicans to work with Democrats to pass “common-sense gun safety legislation”.
The U.S. has seen hundreds of shootings inside schools and colleges in the past two decades, with the deadliest resulting in over 30 deaths at Virginia Tech in 2007.
The carnage has intensified the pitched debate over gun laws and the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, which enshrines the right “to keep and bear arms”.
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