A 14-year-old has been taken into custody in connection to a tragic school shooting in Georgia that resulted in the deaths of four individuals. The suspect gave a disturbing response to authorities following the incident.
On September 4, law enforcement responded to Apalachee High School in Winder, Barrow County, following reports of an active shooter.
Two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, along with two teachers, Christina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall, were fatally shot during the attack.
Seven additional people sustained gunshot injuries, and two other students were injured in different ways.
The suspect, 14-year-old Colt Gray, has been apprehended and will be tried as an adult.
Lyela Sayarath, a classmate of Gray, told CNN that the suspect attempted to enter her classroom but was deterred when another student saw a firearm.
They did not open the locked door, prompting Gray to target another classroom.
“I think he wanted to come to us first,” Sayarath said.
Another student, Macey Right, recounted: “I heard gunshots outside my classroom and people screaming, people begging not to get shot.”
“And then people sitting beside me (were) just shaking and crying.”
According to CNN, Gray surrendered when confronted by a school resource officer.
Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith noted that following Gray’s arrest and during questioning, the teenager admitted to the crime, stating, ‘I did it.’
Further information revealed that the teenager had been interviewed by the FBI in May 2023 after anonymous tips reported online threats of a school shooting at an unspecified location and time.
Gray, accompanied by his father, denied making those threats and was not arrested at that time, according to BBC reports.
In a statement, the FBI said: “The father stated that he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them […] 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.”
Following Colt Gray’s arrest, his father was also detained by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. In a Twitter announcement on September 5, the agency revealed that Colin Gray had been arrested “in connection to the shooting at Apalachee High School” and charged with “four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children.”
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