4 dead in Georgia high school shooting, officials say

ATLANTA — Four people were shot dead at a high school northeast of Atlanta on Wednesday, Georgia law enforcement officials said, the deadliest school shooting in the United States this year and a wrenching start to the new school year.

Students described a shooter with a large weapon stalking the hallways of Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, around an hour’s drive from Atlanta.

Officials identified the suspect in custody as Colt Gray, a 14-year-old student at the school.

Two of the people killed in the shooting were students, and two were teachers, Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at a news conference.

At least nine people were hospitalized with injuries, authorities said, and at least one was flown by helicopter to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, one of the major trauma centers in the region.

The attack, the deadliest school shooting in Georgia’s history, according to a database maintained by the Gun Violence Archive, sent parents scrambling to find their children at the rural campus, which has around 1,800 students. Several other schools in the area were under lockdown.

Officials in Barrow County, Georgia, said that the shooting happened at around 10:20 a.m.

A 14-year-old student at the school told Atlanta News First, a local news outlet, that he was sitting by the door in his classroom when “something told me to look to my left.”

That’s when he saw the shooter “with a big gun” out of the corner of his eye, he said. The student said he ran to the back of the classroom and hid. He estimated the shooter, whom he identified as male, shot about 10 times, making his ears ring.

Information about victims of the shooting began to trickle out Wednesday afternoon.

A social media post by Katie Phenix, whose Facebook profile lists her as an admissions adviser at Emory University, said her father, David Phenix, a coach and teacher at Apalachee, had been shot and injured.

“There was a shooting this morning at Apalachee High School and my dad was shot in the foot and in the hip, shattering his hip bone,” Phenix wrote. “He arrived to the hospital alert and awake. He just got out of surgery and is stable.”

Christian Scott, an 11th grader, said he was walking to see the school nurse when he heard gunshots, and “suddenly, I was under lockdown.”

He said the nurses’ offices were barricaded by beds.

It was a “living hell” from when the shooting started to when he was finally reunited with his sister, also a student, and his friends at the school football field, Christian said.

Students at Apalachee had previously gone through drills to prepare them for how to respond to a shooting on campus. On Wednesday morning, when a lockdown warning flashed in his Spanish classroom, Jose Inciarte assumed that school officials were conducting a test.

“But then we heard keys and running and screaming,” he recalled a few hours later as he left campus.

The streets surrounding the school were clogged Wednesday with law enforcement officers and emergency responders. Panicked parents, some parking more than a mile away, walked toward the school, looking for their children. Hundreds of evacuated students were waiting on the school’s football field.

Barrow County schools will be closed the rest of the week, the superintendent said at the news conference.

The shooting immediately prompted calls from Democrats for gun control legislation. President Joe Biden issued a statement decrying “more senseless gun violence.”

“Students across the country are learning how to duck and cover instead of how to read and write,” the statement said. “We cannot continue to accept this as normal.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, called the Georgia shooting “outrageous.”

“It’s just outrageous that every day in our country in the United States of America that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive,” she said.

Former President Donald Trump offered his condolences in a statement. “Our hearts are with the victims and loved ones of those affected by the tragic event in Winder, Ga.,” he wrote on Truth Social. “These cherished children were taken from us far too soon by a sick and deranged monster.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company