Four people were killed and nine others were hurt in a shooting at a high school in northern Georgia on Wednesday morning, according to the police.
Four people were killed at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey. Two of the people killed were students, and the other two were teachers.
The suspect was named as Colt Gray, a 14-year-old student at the school, Hosey said. He was caught while still living. The person who is thought to have shot will be charged with murder and “handled” as an adult, Hosey said.
Mason Schermerhorn, 14, Christian Angulo, 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, were named as the victims. The school’s webpage says that both Aspinwall and Irimie taught math.
Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said that all nine of the people who were taken to the hospital had been shot “in some way.” Smith said that all nine were likely to live.
Smith said that the suspect gave up when he was met by responding police officers. Smith said that the accused shooter was talking to police, and that these talks were “helping with our investigation.” The Barrow County Detention Center was where he was being held.
Hosey said there was no proof that any other shooters were involved and the accused shooter used a gun that looked like an AR platform.
Hosey said in a late-night news conference, “We’re still trying to clear up a lot of the timeline from the time he got to school today to the time the incident happened.”
On social media Wednesday night, FBI Atlanta said that county police had talked to the suspect about online threats to shoot up a school last year.
Officials at FBI Atlanta say that the posts were made in Georgia and that “the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office referred the information to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office for action.”
The sheriff’s office talked to the boy, who was 13 at the time, and his father. The boy said that the threats were not his fault. FBI Atlanta said the father said he had shooting guns in the house but that his son did not have “unsupervised access to them.”
“FBI Atlanta said that Jackson County told area schools to keep an eye on the subject. “At that time, there was no probable cause for arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state, or federal levels.”
Three people who had been shot were taken to Northeast Georgia Medical Center Barrow and one to Northeast Georgia Medical Center Gainesville. All three of them had injuries that were not thought to be life-threatening. Grady Health System runs Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. A spokesperson for the system earlier said that staff had received one patient from the high school with a gunshot wound.
A spokesperson for the hospital system told CBS News that in addition to the injured, many patients came in with anxiety signs and some were having panic attacks.
Smith said, “This is a very, very fluid search.” “This is going to take multiple days for us to get answers as to what happened and why this happened.”
Online reports said that there might be an active shooter at the school in Winder, Georgia, which is about 50 miles northeast of Atlanta. Earlier, administrators put all students and staff on lockdown. The spot was visited by police at around 10:23 a.m. EDT, according to the sheriff. The school said that the building was cleared in an hour and that kids were starting to be sent home with their families.
Smith says that the threat was reported to the police because of a new security system that was put in place about a week ago. Smith said that at the time of the shooting, there were three school security officers on campus.