At least four people have died after a gunman opened fire at a high school in Georgia, USA.
Police and medics rushed to the school and the neighbourhood was put under “a hard lockdown”.
The suspect was identified as 14-year-old Colt Gray, a student at the school and taken into custody.
In a statement, the FBI said its National Threat Operations Centre had alerted local law enforcement in May 2023 after receiving anonymous tips about “online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time”. The agency said that within 24 hours investigators had determined that the threats originated in Georgia. He was interviewed last year by police about anonymous online threats, the FBI has said. Sheriff’s deputies interviewed the boy and his father, who “stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them”, the FBI said. The suspect, who was 13 years old at the time, denied making the online threats and officials “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject”. “At the time, there was no probable cause for an arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels,” added the FBI statement.
The weapon used in the shooting was an AR-15-style rifle, a law enforcement official told CNN. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation or GBI said it responded to the “shooting” at at the Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia
“At approximately 10:23 a.m., officers from multiple law enforcement agencies and Fire/EMS personnel were dispatched to the high school in reference to a reported active shooting,” the Barrow County Sheriff’s office said in a statement.
Students were evacuated from the scene of the shooting and several were seen huddled at a field near the school. The Barrow County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that the suspect has been taken into custody.
ABC News quoted a witness, student Sergio Caldera, as saying he was in chemistry class when he heard gunshots. Caldera, 17, told ABC his teacher opened the door and another teacher ran in to tell her to shut the door “because there’s an active shooter.”
As students and teachers huddled in the room, someone pounded on his classroom door and shouted several times for it to be opened. When the knocking stopped, Caldera heard more gunshots and screams. He said his class later evacuated to the school’s football field, reported Reuters.
Addressing a brief news conference at the school grounds, Georgia Sheriff Jud Smith said, “What we see behind us is an evil thing today.”
Meanwhile, former US President Donald Trump called the shooter a “sick and deranged monster” in a post on Truth Social.
(Agencies; Picture Courtesy: WorldSource24)
