Four people were killed and nine others were hospitalized with injuries after a shooting at a high school in northern Georgia Wednesday morning, authorities confirmed.
Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at an afternoon press conference that two of the victims killed were students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
The suspect was identified as 14-year-old Colt Gray, a student at the school, Hosey said. He was taken alive. The suspected shooter will be charged with murder and “treated” as an adult, Hosey added.
Gray is currently being held at the Gainesville Regional Youth Detention Center in Georgia, a spokesman for the state’s juvenile justice agency told CBS News.
The victims were identified as Mason Schermerhorn, 14, Christian Angulo, 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53. Aspinwall and Irimie were both math teachers, according to the school’s website.
All nine victims being treated at the hospital were shot “in one way or another,” said Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith. All nine are expected to survive, Smith said.
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The suspect surrendered when confronted by police officers, Smith said. Smith revealed that the suspected shooter had spoken with authorities and that those conversations “helped our investigation.” He was being held at the Barrow County Detention Center.
The suspected shooter used an AR-type weapon and there is no evidence that other shooters were involved, Hosey said.
“We are still trying to establish the timeline from his arrival here at the school to the incident,” Hosey said at a late night press conference.
FBI Atlanta said on social media On Wednesday evening, it was reported that district authorities had questioned the suspect last year about online threats that he wanted to commit a school shooting.
According to FBI Atlanta, the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center determined that the posts originated in Georgia and “the FBI Atlanta field office forwarded the information to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office for further processing.”
The sheriff’s office interviewed the boy, then 13, and his father. The boy said he was not responsible for the threats. The father said he had hunting weapons in the house, but his son did not have “unsupervised access to them,” FBI Atlanta said.
“Jackson County has alerted local schools to continue monitoring the individual,” FBI Atlanta said. “At this time, there was no probable cause for an arrest or for further law enforcement action at the local, state or federal level.”
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Two gunshot victims were taken to Northeast Georgia Medical Center Barrow and one gunshot victim was taken to Northeast Georgia Medical Center Gainesville. All three had injuries that were not considered life-threatening. A spokesman for Grady Health System, which operates Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, previously said staff admitted a patient with a gunshot wound from the high school.
In addition to the injured, several patients were admitted to the hospital with anxiety symptoms, while others suffered panic attacks, a spokesman confirmed to CBS News.
“The investigation is very, very slow,” Smith said. “It will take us several days to get answers as to what happened and why it happened.”
School officials had previously imposed a curfew on students and staff when reports surfaced online of a possible shooting at the school in Winder, Georgia, about 50 miles northeast of Atlanta. According to the sheriff’s office, officers were dispatched to the scene at about 10:23 a.m. EDT. The area was cleared within an hour, the school said, and students were released to their families.
According to Smith, police were informed of the threat thanks to a new security system that had been installed about a week earlier. Smith noted that three school security officers were on campus at the time of the shooting.
Marques Coleman, 14, a student at the school, told CBS affiliate WANF he was in the classroom when the shooting happened and something in his head told him to look to his left. “I see a boy with a, he had like a big gun,” said Coleman, who said the student just started shooting. “I got up, started running, he started shooting, about 10 times. He shot at least 10 times.”
Coleman said he jumped behind the desk and his teacher stood in front of him. “My teacher started barricading the door with desks,” he said. When he got up, Coleman told WANF he saw “one of my classmates lying on the floor bleeding so badly,” shot another girl in the leg and shot a friend in the stomach.
“I just thank God that I wasn’t the one that got hit, you know, right in the middle of all that. I just thanked God because he had his hands around me and everything, because I could have been the one to get here, because I was right there. He easily could have got me. But God had his hands around me,” Coleman said.
A heavy police presence was seen on school property Wednesday morning, WANF reported around 11 a.m. Aerial footage from the news station showed dozens of ambulances, police officers and a rescue helicopter gathered in the parking lot and on the grassy area in front of the building. By that point, at least one person had been taken to the helicopter on a stretcher, according to WANF, and students were being evacuated to the school’s stadium, where buses were to pick them up.
Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were also called to the scene. The FBI Atlanta said in a statement shared on social media shortly before 12 p.m. that they were “coordinating and assisting local law enforcement.”
WANF TV
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp addressed the situation in a social media statement released around the same time, saying his office had allocated state resources to help respond to what he described as “the incident at Apalachee High School.”
“I have directed all available state resources to respond to the incident at Apalachee High School and I urge all Georgians to join my family in praying for the safety of those in our classrooms, both in Barrow County and across the state,” Kemp said. “We will continue to work with local, state and federal partners as we gather information and continue to respond to this situation.”
President Biden and his administration were informed about the shooting, the White House press office said in a statement.
“President Biden has been briefed by his Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall on the tragic shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, and his administration will continue to coordinate with federal, state, and local authorities as we receive more information,” the statement said.
Apalachee High School has an enrollment of about 1,900 students. Classes begin at 8:15 a.m. each day, according to the district calendar. Schools in Barrow County will remain closed for the rest of the week, the school’s superintendent said.
Pat Milton contributed to this report.
