Apalachee High School, Ga, Shooting (2024)

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    After Georgia Shooting, a Grief-Stricken City Seeks Solace, and Answers

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    At candlelight vigils and in Sunday church services, at fund-raisers for funerals and in quiet moments at home, another city began wrestling with a grief that has been inflicted on numerous American communities before it, a profound sorrow swirled with anger and confusion caused by a deadly mass shooting.And now, those emotions in Winder, Ga., were streaked with budding doubts there had been missed opportunities to intervene before a gunman killed two students and two teachers last week at Apalachee High School.Some in the community — including family members of victims, and students and parents at the school — expressed increased skepticism on Sunday about whether indications that the 14-year-old suspect was a threat had been adequately heeded by the teenager’s family, school officials and law enforcement officials.The concern grew after reports emerged of the suspect’s mother calling the school roughly a half-hour before the authorities responded to the shooting, apparently to warn them.“We believe it was preventable — 100 percent,” Lisette Angulo, the older sister of Christian Angulo, a 14-year-old boy who was killed, said of her and her family’s perspective in a message sent to The New York Times. “They knew of the situation beforehand,” she said, “and didn’t take proper action to prevent this tragedy from happening.”Ms. Angulo praised the officers and emergency workers who responded to the shooting on Wednesday morning, namely the school resource officers to whom the suspect surrendered. They had acted “efficiently and appropriately,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mother of Georgia Suspect Called School Minutes Before Shooting, Family Says

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      The mother told relatives she reached out to the school on Wednesday morning, warning of an emergency, the suspect’s aunt said Saturday.The mother of the 14-year-old boy charged with fatally shooting four people at his Georgia high school this week told relatives that she had called the school on the morning of the attack, warning of an “extreme emergency,” her sister said on Saturday.Officials said the suspect, Colt Gray, opened fire on Wednesday morning on the campus of Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., killing two students and two teachers and injuring nine others. The authorities said reports of a shooting came in at about 10:20 a.m. But the suspect’s mother, Marcee Gray, had apparently called the school at 9:50 a.m., her sister, Annie Brown, said.It was unclear what in particular led the mother to call the school that morning.The emergence of the possible alert from the suspect’s mother intensifies the scrutiny now applied to his family, school officials and law enforcement officials about missed opportunities to heed warning signs and intervene before the attack.Ms. Gray told Ms. Brown in a text message after the shooting that she had notified a counselor at the school, Ms. Brown said. The phone call to the school was first reported on Saturday by The Washington Post, which cited Ms. Brown, text messages and a call log from the family’s shared phone plan that documented a 10-minute phone call from the mother’s number to the school.Ms. Brown confirmed the details of The Post’s reporting to The New York Times on Saturday evening. And a federal law enforcement official confirmed that the mother had called the school shortly before the shooting.A spokeswoman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which has been handling the investigation, declined to comment on Saturday. Jud Smith, the sheriff for Barrow County, Ga., where the shooting occurred, did not immediately reply to messages seeking comment, nor did officials from the Barrow County School System.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Georgia to Put School Shooting Suspect’s Parent on Trial, Testing a Novel Tactic

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      After four people were killed at Apalachee High School, prosecutors charged a student and his father, who officials say had given the boy the gun as a gift.In a landmark criminal case in Michigan earlier this year, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents convicted in connection with killings carried out by their child in a mass shooting.Now, in the first mass school shooting in the United States since those convictions, Georgia officials appear poised to try the same tactic. On Thursday, prosecutors filed charges, including two counts of second-degree murder, against the father of the suspected gunman, saying he had provided a gun to his son “with knowledge that he was a threat to himself and others.”Such charges were all but unheard of before the Michigan case, and the Georgia prosecution will test the emerging push to hold parents responsible for mass shootings by young people.The bigger test may be whether the prospect of criminal prosecution spurs parents to do more to seek help for troubled children and to keep them away from guns in a country awash in firearms.Proponents of such prosecutions have said that charging parents can help prevent young people from carrying out such shootings. But critics say it’s a misguided effort that scapegoats parents while lawmakers fail to act to reduce gun violence. And its effectiveness as a deterrent may be limited by the deep dysfunction already at play in the families of some of the young people implicated in mass shootings.The prosecution of the Crumbleys, after their 15-year-old son killed four people in 2021 at a high school outside Detroit, was seen as a long shot. But in separate trials, the Crumbleys were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and were sentenced to 10 years in prison.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Georgia Suspect’s Family Faced Eviction and Other Turmoil Before Shooting

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      Court and law enforcement records lay out the turbulence in the teenager’s family in recent years.The 14-year-old accused of killing four people at his Georgia high school this week had switched middle schools and drawn the attention of authorities who suspected he had posted school shooting threats online.His mother had repeated encounters with law enforcement and had been ordered to stay away from drugs and alcohol. His family had been evicted from their home because of unpaid rent, and his parents had split.Interviews with relatives and others who knew the teenager, and a review of court documents and law enforcement records, reflected a family in constant turmoil in the years before the shooting this week at Apalachee High School in Winder.The suspect, Colt Gray, has been charged with four counts of murder for the Wednesday morning attack in which two students and two math teachers were killed and eight other students were injured. During his first court appearance on Friday, a judge informed him that he could face a maximum penalty of life in prison.His father, Colin Gray, is facing second-degree murder and other charges, as officials argue that he shoulders considerable blame for giving his son the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle used in the attack. The weapon was a Christmas gift last year, according to three law enforcement officials. Mr. Gray, 54, faces a maximum sentence of 180 years in prison, if convicted.During the brief hearing on Friday, relatives of the people who were killed sat directly behind the defendants, only a few feet away. The grief that the community in Winder is now wrestling with was palpable.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tip on Georgia School Shooting Threat Last Year Led to Suspect’s Door

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      The teenager charged with killing four people at his Georgia high school on Wednesday denied making an online threat, and the authorities could not prove he did. He, and now his father, face murder charges.JEFFERSON, Ga. — The threat posted online last year to “shoot up a middle school” was the kind that the authorities have become all too familiar with in the United States.After receiving tips about the threat, the authorities homed in on a 13-year-old boy in Georgia, and an investigator spoke with the teenager and his father.During the conversation in May 2023, the boy, Colt Gray, assured the investigator, from the sheriff’s office in Jackson County, Ga., that he had not made the threat. He said that he had not used Discord, the social media site where the threat was posted, in months, and that he had deleted his account.“The only thing I have is TikTok, but I just go on there and watch videos,” the teenager said, according to a transcript obtained by The New York Times.The teenager’s father, Colin Gray, confided that his son had been picked on in middle school and said that he had been teaching him about firearms and the outdoors to get him away from video games.“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do and how to use them and not use them,” the elder Mr. Gray said, adding that his son had recently shot his first deer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What We Know About the Apalachee High School Shooting Victims

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      The shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., on Wednesday killed two teachers and two students, becoming the deadliest episode of school violence in the state’s history. At least nine others were injured.The authorities identified the dead students as two 14-year-olds, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo. The educators killed were identified as Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie, officials said. Spellings of the names were not confirmed by the authorities.Law enforcement officials said in a news conference that the victims taken to the hospital were expected to make a full recovery.“Those that are deceased are heroes in my book,” said Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “Those that are in the hospital recovering right now are heroes in my book.”Mason Schermerhorn was described by friends of his family as a lighthearted teenager who liked spending time with his family, reading, telling jokes, playing video games and visiting Walt Disney World. He had recently started at the school.“He really enjoyed life,” said Doug Kilburn, 40, a friend who has known Schermerhorn’s mother for a decade. “He always had an upbeat attitude about everything.”Louis Briscoe, a co-worker and friend of Schermerhorn’s mother, said the boy and his family were looking forward to an upcoming vacation there.When Mr. Briscoe learned about the shooting at the high school in the afternoon, he called Schermerhorn’s mother to ask if everything was OK. She told him: “Mason’s gone.”“My heart just dropped,” said Mr. Briscoe, 45. He added, “Nobody should have to go through this type of pain.”The gunman — who the authorities identified as a 14-year-old student at the school — will be charged with murder, officials said. Students heard gunfire as they barricaded themselves in classrooms.The shooting has shaken residents in Winder, which has about 18,000 residents and is roughly 50 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta.At the high school, Ms. Irimie and Mr. Aspinwall were math teachers. Mr. Aspinwall was also the football team’s defensive coordinator.David Phenix, a math special education teacher and the school’s golf coach, was injured during the shooting. Katie Phenix, his daughter, said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that he was shot in the foot and hip, shattering his hip bone.“He arrived to the hospital alert and awake,” she wrote in the post, adding that he had surgery earlier that day.Kate Selig More