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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

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      Demolition Crew Tears Down Texas Church Where Gunman Killed 26

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      The move to raze the church in Sutherland Springs, which had served as a memorial to the victims of the 2017 massacre, came over objections from some in the community.Over the past seven years, Terrie Smith had often stopped to mourn at the small church in the town of Sutherland Springs, Texas, where a U.S. Air Force veteran gunned down 26 people, including her close friend and two of her friend’s children.On Monday, when she saw an excavator at the site, her heart sank and her stomach tightened, she said. “They are going to demolish it,” she said.Despite opposition from many in town, crews began tearing down First Baptist Church, a small sanctuary in the tiny hamlet 45 miles east of San Antonio that became the scene of one of the deadliest mass shootings in the nation’s history.The fate of the building had remained uncertain as a battle over its future played out in the courts. Though a majority of church members had voted in 2021 to raze it, with church officials expressing concern for the 100-year-old building’s structure, others filed a lawsuit claiming that not all members had been allowed to cast votes and should be given the opportunity to have their say.Early last month, a judge in Wilson County, which includes Sutherland Springs, granted a temporary restraining order halting the demolition. Only two weeks later, a different judge denied a request to extend that order, clearing the way to raze the church.Lawyers representing the families who opposed the demolition did not respond to a request for comment.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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      Thomas Crooks, Donald Trump, and the Banality of Gun Violence

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      Eleven of the last 12 American presidents have endured an assassination attempt or a plot against their lives. The same is true for 20 of the country’s 45.Most of the recent plots have been foiled early, making the indelible image of Donald Trump fist-pumping in Pennsylvania seem like an atavistic monument or an ominous portent, or perhaps both. In the bedtime-story version of our national mythology, the country left behind the violence and disorder of the 1960s decades ago, for what turned out to be a wobbly but enduring peaceful equilibrium, one whose veneer began to crack only recently, with violent rhetoric rekindling over the last decade especially prominently on the right. But as David Dayen noted in The American Prospect the day after the shooting, in the 1970s Gerald Ford was shot at, and in the 1980s Ronald Reagan was actually shot; in both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidencies, shots were fired at the White House.Not all of these attempts were serious, but if amateur marksmanship and a chance gust of wind are what spared Donald Trump’s life last Saturday, similar vicissitudes might have ended Ford’s or Reagan’s, as well, in which case we would all be telling very different stories about the last 50 years of American history. And though we may describe the stochastic terror of the last decade in terms of ugly bumper stickers and reckless speeches, there has been real violence, not just incitement. Gabrielle Giffords was in fact shot, and almost killed; Steve Scalise, too.“America is staring into the abyss,” The Financial Times declared in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting, but often we see chaos around the corner as a way of telling ourselves it hasn’t already arrived. “No political party, movement, ideology or manner of thinking has had an absolute monopoly on this violence, and it really hasn’t mattered whether the surrounding political atmosphere was aggressive or docile,” Dayen wrote. “In our messy reality, political violence exists as a background hum.” Already, it seems, the assassination attempt has faded from the news, having hardly made a mark on the shape of the presidential race or, beyond a few ear bandages worn in showy solidarity, on the Republican National Convention which almost immediately followed.It’s not even clear whether it is right to call last weekend’s shooting an act of political violence. The attempted assassination produced only a brief flare of partisan meaning, though the motive was never clear. The gunman was a registered Republican and recognizably a conservative to classmates but not, it seems, an especially active or outraged political actor, and had not left much of a memorable ideological impression on those who knew him. He apparently donated $15 to a progressive organization in 2021, and as OSINT sleuths and self-deputized detectives argued about it over the weekend, it was striking to think how much meaning seemed to hang on a donation the size of a trip to Starbucks. When no obvious partisan explanation was immediately found, we simply moved on.Perhaps a motive will become clearer in the days ahead. But for now, there is not much more to go on, and it seems likeliest that the would-be assassin remains a kind of cipher. Like the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock before him, Thomas Crooks briefly tore a rupture in the fabric of American reality only to fill the space with a kind of silence, a mute biography and an unstated philosophy — a peculiarly American kind of terrorism in which the act of violence does not call attention to a cause greater than the shooter or generate a politically strategic backlash. Instead, it briefly elevates the profile of the man with the gun.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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      Shooting at a Trump Rally in Pennsylvania: Maps and Photos

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      The Associated Press; Photograph By Doug Mills/The New York Times Former President Donald J. Trump was whisked off the stage at his rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday after gunshots were fired toward the area where he was speaking. Officials said the incident was being investigated as an assassination attempt. The rally took place on the […] More

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      No Apparent Motive in Arkansas Shooting, but the Reaction Is ‘So Personal’

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      The shooting in which a gunman killed four and injured 10 at a grocery store in a town of 3,400 appeared to be a “completely random, senseless act,” the police said Sunday.The gunman who opened fire on Friday at a grocery store in Fordyce, Ark., killing four people and hurting 10 others, did not appear to target anyone, officials say, or have any known links to the victims. But the officers in the town of 3,400 who rushed there and eventually subdued the assailant could not have felt more connected.“They knew everyone personally, from the suspect to the victims on scene,” said Col. Mike Hagar, the director of the Arkansas State Police. He said the officers and deputies were not referring to the victims generically. “They’re calling them by name. They know these people. They’re their friends. They’re their neighbors.” And that, he said, has made this “so personal and so difficult.”That level of closeness was among the revelations Sunday as the police provided the fullest account yet of what was essentially eight minutes of mayhem. Officers arrived at the Mad Butcher grocery store three minutes after the first shot was fired, then took down the gunman five minutes later.Four people died: Callie Weems, 23; Roy Sturgis, 50; Shirley Taylor, 62; and Ellen Shrum, 81. An additional person was identified late Saturday as having been injured by the gunman, bringing the total to 10. Of the five people who remained hospitalized, one woman was still in critical condition at a hospital in Little Rock, Mr. Hagar said. Ms. Weems, who was trained as a nurse, was inside the grocery store. When she saw that someone had been shot, she tended to that person instead of fleeing the store, Mr. Hagar said. Then she was shot herself.“One of the most selfless acts I’ve ever seen,” he said.The suspect, Travis Eugene Posey, 44, of nearby New Edinburg, is expected to be charged with four counts of capital murder, which could include the death penalty. It was not clear when he would make his first court appearance, Mr. Hagar said. It was also unclear whether Mr. Posey had legal representation. 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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      After Splash Park Shooting, Michigan Community Feels a Familiar Pain

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      The violence in the city of Rochester Hills, which injured nine people including children, comes three years after the shooting at Oxford High School in the same county. One day after a shooting in a splash park in suburban Detroit injured nine people, including children, residents on Sunday were struggling to process what happened, with bafflement, fear and shock. “It was hard to go to sleep last night. It’s hard to function this morning,” said Alex Roser, a 33-year-old pharmacy technician who said he grew up in the area.On Saturday afternoon, a gunman opened fire at a splash pad — a play area for children with blue cylinders that spray water — in Rochester Hills. The police identified the shooter as Michael William Nash, 42, and said that the handgun recovered at the scene was legally purchased in 2015 and registered to him. Authorities said that a motive was not yet known but that the attack appeared to be random. Mr. Nash was found dead with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound later on Saturday in his home nearby, they said. The wounded included an 8-year-old boy, a 4-year-old boy and their 39-year-old mother, authorities said. Others at the park that day were a city employee and 14 of his friends and family members. The city employee’s wife was shot, Mayor Bryan Barnett of Rochester Hills said Sunday. He added that two of the victims were in critical condition, while the others were stable.As the community reeled, it was not lost on residents that this was the second shooting in the area in recent years: In 2021 at Oxford High School in the same county, a student fatally shot four of his classmates and injured seven others. And many were horrified that this time it happened so close to their home, in a city that promotes itself on its website as one of the safest in America. 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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      At Least 9 Shot at Michigan Splash Park, Police Say

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      The authorities said the shooting in Rochester Hills, Mich., appeared to be random and that the gunman exited a car and opened fire.A gunman opened fire at a Michigan splash park on Saturday in what the authorities said was a random attack that left at least nine people, including a child, wounded, the police said.The shooting occurred at Brooklands Plaza Splash Pad in Rochester Hills, Mich., a Detroit suburb, the authorities said. Officers were called to the scene just after 5 p.m.“It appears to be a random active shooter,” Michael Bouchard, the Oakland County sheriff, said at a news conference. More

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      Children Among Dozens Killed in Attack on Sudanese Village

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      Videos showed paramilitaries opening fire on the village in what had been Sudan’s breadbasket region, causing the latest mass civilian casualties in a brutal yearlong war.A gun and artillery assault by Sudanese paramilitaries on a village in Sudan’s main farming region killed at least 104 people, including dozens of children, Sudanese pro-democracy activists said.The exact circumstances of the attack on Wednesday at Wad al-Noura, a village 70 miles south of the capital, Khartoum, were disputed.But the high death toll, as well as images of a mass burial on Thursday that circulated on social media, and were verified by The New York Times, drew international condemnation and made the assault the latest flashpoint in Sudan’s brutal yearlong war.“Even by the tragic standards of Sudan’s conflict, the images emerging from Wad Al-Noura are heartbreaking,” Clementine Nkweta-Salami, the top U.N. official in Sudan, said in a statement.“The world is watching,” the British Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, wrote on social media. “Those responsible will be held to account.”Still, Sudan has seen numerous atrocities yet little accountability since it plunged into a disastrous civil war just over a year ago, when fighting broke out between the national army and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces.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