The 45th school shooting of the year happened at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, on Wednesday, leaving two 14-year-old students and two math teachers dead, along with nine others hospitalized suffering gunshot wounds from an AR-platform weapon.
Killed Wednesday were Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and math teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53. Eight other students and one teacher were wounded.
- The 14-year-old suspect, Colt Gray, was engaged by a school resource officer shortly after shots were fired. Gray laid on the ground and was apprehended. He is in custody at a youth detention center and is expected to appear in court on Friday. He is charged with murder, and will be tried as an adult. The Barrow County Sheriff says the suspect’s statements are helping the investigation.
According to a statement from the FBI and the Sheriff’s office, Gray was questioned by law enforcement last year regarding “anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting,” but Gray denied making the threats. At the time, “there was no probable cause for arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state, or federal levels,” the statement said.
Gray’s father said “he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them,” the agencies said.
The suspect left his Algebra 1 class around 9:45 a.m. and returned later around 10:20 a.m., knocking on the automatically locked door to be let in. Another student went to open the door, but apparently saw the gun and refused to open it. Instead, the gunman turned to a nearby classroom and opened fire.
One new protocol the school implemented included a safety measure adopted just one week ago.
“All of our teachers are armed with a form of an ID called Centegix,” Sheriff Smith said Wednesday night. Centegix alerts law enforcement “after buttons are pressed on an ID and it alerts us that there is an active situation at the school for whatever reason and that was pressed.”
