14-year-old US school massacre suspect questioned about threats made last year

A boy accused of killing four people at his Georgia high school was questioned by police last year about anonymous online threats, the FBI said.

In May 2023, 14-year-old Colt Gray denied to police that he was behind internet posts that contained images of guns and warned of a school shooting.

The suspect opened fire at Apalachee High School in the town of Winder on Wednesday, killing two teachers and two students, investigators said. Eight students and one teacher were injured.

He was arrested on campus and is being prosecuted as an adult.

Police have identified the victims as teachers Christina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall and 14-year-old students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo.

In a press conference, Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said the weapon used was an “AR platform style weapon.”

In a statement, the FBI said its National Threat Operations Center alerted local law enforcement in May 2023 after receiving anonymous tips about “online threats to commit a school shooting at an unknown location and time.”

The agency said investigators determined within 24 hours that the threats originated in Georgia.

Sheriff’s deputies questioned the boy and his father, who “stated he had hunting weapons in the house, but the individual did not have unsupervised access to them,” the FBI said.

The suspect, then 13, denied making the online threats and officials “instructed local schools to continue to monitor the individual.”

“At that time, there was no reasonable cause to warrant an arrest or to initiate further law enforcement action at the local, state or federal level,” the FBI statement continued.

Sheriff Jud Smith described the attack as “pure evil” and said officers were on the scene within minutes of receiving the 911 call at 10:20 a.m. local time (2:20 p.m. GMT).

Two officers assigned to the school “immediately encountered the perpetrator,” the sheriff said, adding that the boy “immediately surrendered.”

The boy was interviewed once while in custody and spoke with investigators, Sheriff Smith said.

The sheriff added that no motive has been identified and that law enforcement “does not know of any targets at this time.”

Students described chaotic scenes as alarms went off that an attacker was on campus. Classes began at Apalachee last month, but many students across the U.S. are returning to schools this week.

Lyela Sayarath, who was in the alleged attacker’s class, told CNN that the suspect left the room at the beginning of an algebra class.

She said he returned and knocked on the door, which automatically locked, but another student refused him entry after noticing that he had a gun.

Lyela told CNN that the attacker then went into the classroom next door and started shooting.

Marques Coleman, 14, said he saw the attacker holding a “large gun” immediately before the shooting began.

“I got up and ran. He started shooting, about ten times. He shot at least ten times,” he told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

“My teacher started barricading the door with tables,” he said.

After getting up, the student said he saw “one of my classmates lying on the floor bleeding profusely,” another girl with a gunshot wound to her leg, and a friend with a gunshot wound to her stomach.

On Wednesday evening, a vigil was held in the city of 18,000 inhabitants, about 80 kilometers from Atlanta.

According to a database from Education Week magazine, this was the 23rd school shooting at a U.S. school in 2024. The database has so far counted eleven deaths and 38 injuries in such attacks this year.

David Riedman, who maintains the K-12 school shooting database, told Reuters that the Georgia shooting was the first “planned attack” on a school this fall semester.