Alarm bells began ringing more than a year ago. An FBI investigation into online threats of a school shooting, accompanied by photos of guns, led law enforcement officers to the home of Colt Gray, a 14-year-old accused of killing two teachers and two students at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia on Wednesday. Nine other victims – eight students and one teacher – were taken to hospital and are expected to survive their injuries, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The suspect surrendered to school resource officers who confronted him.
During that early investigation last year, officers from the sheriff’s office in Jackson County questioned the teen and his father, but found no grounds for arrest. Gray, whom a classmate described on Wednesday as a quiet boy who barely spoke at school, will be charged with murder and prosecuted as an adult, according to the authorities.
In May 2023, the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center received several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified time and location. The threats contained photographs of weapons. Within 24 hours, the FBI determined that the online posts had originated in Georgia. The FBI’s Atlanta office forwarded the information to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, according to a joint statement by the FBI’s Atlanta office and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.
Local officers identified a possible suspect, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. The father stated that he had hunting weapons at home, but that his sons did not have unsupervised access to them. The boy denied making the online threats. Jackson County alerted local schools to continue monitoring the teen. However, at the time authorities saw no likely cause “to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels.”
Gray’s current school is in another county, Barrow County, and apparently the information exchange was deficient. According to local radio station WSB-TV, a neighbor of the family saw the boy take the school bus on Wednesday morning wearing a sweatshirt and a backpack, although his father normally drove him to school.
Eyewitnesses told local media that Gray walked out of the math class and that the door to his classroom locked automatically. When he tried to return, one of the students inside saw that he was carrying a gun and did not open it. Shortly afterward the shooting began, apparently in a hallway of the school and an adjoining classroom. Gray used an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, according to authorities, who are still investigating how he got hold of it. Police carried out searches at the accused’s home on Wednesday.
“He never talked”
In an interview on CNN, Lyela Sayarath, a junior at Apalachee High School who said she sat next to the shooter, described him as a “quiet kid” who had recently transferred to the school and often skipped class. “He never really talked. He was pretty quiet. He wasn’t there most times, he just didn’t come to school or he skipped class. But even when he did talk, it was one-word answers or just short statements,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you what his voice sounded like, or even describe his face. “He was just there.”
Sayarath said he wasn’t surprised that he was the shooter. “When you think about shooters and how they act or the things they do, it’s usually the quiet guy or at least that’s the stereotype, and he was the one that fits that description in our class,” he said.
Little more has emerged about the suspect. It is not yet known if there was any trigger for him to carry out those threats made almost a year and a half earlier.
There have been 45 school shootings so far this year. The US has experienced at least 385 mass shootings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are shot.
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