14-year-old kills four in Georgia high school shooting

A 14-year-old student opened fire at his Georgia high school in the United States on Wednesday, killing two students and two teachers before surrendering to school resource officers.

Officials identified the 14-year-old suspect as Colt Gray, and said that he would be prosecuted as an adult, for murder.

Students, barely a month into the new school year at Apalachee High in Winder, Georgia, described their terror as a lockdown initially thought to be a drill, led to them being barricaded themselves in classrooms as they heard gunfire, before fleeing to a football field to reunite with their anxious parents.

The attack, which also injured eight students and a teacher, stoked fear and anguish in Winder, a city of roughly 18,000 people outside Atlanta, as the community grappled with a burst of violence that the local sheriff described as “pure evil.”

Chris Hosey, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said on Wednesday evening that the shooter had used an “AR-platform-style weapon”.

The authorities were still investigating how he had gained access to the gun. Rifles based on the AR-15 design have been used in other mass shootings.

All of the victims who were at the hospital were expected to survive their injuries.

But the suspect had been on the radar of law enforcement officials more than a year ago in connection with threats of a school shooting posted online, the F.B.I. said. He and his father were interviewed by local law enforcement officials; he denied making the threats, but the authorities alerted local schools.

The shooting was the deadliest episode of school violence in Georgia history, and prompted an outpouring of sympathy and outrage.

President Joe Biden, in a statement, lamented the attack as “another horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart.”

The authorities were led Gray, 13 at the time, after the F.B.I.’s National Threat Operations Centre received several anonymous tips in May 2023 reporting threats that had been posted on an online gaming site warning of a school shooting at “an unidentified location and time.”

The threats included photographs of guns.

Investigators from the sheriff’s office in Jackson County, Ga., interviewed the suspect and his father. His father told investigators that he had hunting guns in the house, but said that his son did not have unsupervised access to the weapons. The suspect denied making the threats.

The F.B.I. said that the Jackson County authorities alerted local schools “for continued monitoring of the subject.” But it was unclear if officials at Apalachee High School, where the shooting took place and the suspect was a student this year, had been among those informed.

The F.B.I said that investigators had lacked probable cause to arrest the teenager or “take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels.”

In a separate statement, Janis G. Mangum, the sheriff in Jackson County, said that a “thorough investigation was conducted,” but that “the gaming site threats could not be substantiated.”