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The school in Georgia has been placed on lockdown. The FBI and ATF are on scene assisting local law enforcement.
It all started a little before 10:30 a.m. in the state of Georgia in the United States, when the police received an alert. An armed individual was on the campus of Apalachee High School in Winder, a city of 18,000 inhabitants an hour northeast of Atlanta. Colt Gray, a 14-year-old student, killed four people, two teachers and two high school students, and injured nine others before surrendering and being arrested and taken into custody. Confronted by a police officer assigned to security at the school, “The shooter quickly realized that if he did not surrender”the officer was going to open fire, said Jud Smith, the local sheriff. “He gave up, got on the ground and the officer arrested him.”he added. If he has already spoken to investigators, “we have no knowledge of any target” that the teenager would have aimed at, “for now”Authorities said the killer, who was a student at the school, would be charged with murder and tried as an adult, a practice that is increasingly common in the United States.
The roughly 2,000 students at Apalachee High School, a large rural campus, initially thought it was a drill like all American schools do to prepare for such incidents. School had started about a month ago. Sergio Caldera, a 17-year-old student, was in chemistry class when he heard gunfire. At one point, he said, someone pounded on the door and yelled: “Open”. He then heard multiple gunshots and screams. Another student testified that he heard doors slamming and gunshots followed by police shouting to someone: “There’s a shooting, lie down, go back to class”. All schools in the region have implemented the now-familiar protocol for dealing with a gunman on campus. There have been 23 school shootings with casualties in the United States this year, with the Georgia shooting being the deadliest. “We prepare you for this kind of thing, said Isabelle, a 15-year-old high school student. But at that moment I started crying, I was a bundle of nerves.”.
Two months before the election, this new tragedy puts the issue of firearms back at the heart of the election campaign, particularly in Georgia, one of the key states. Vice President Kamala Harris called the shooting a “absurd tragedy.” “It’s shocking that every day in our country parents have to send their children to school worrying about whether they’ll come home alive,” she said at a campaign rally in New Hampshire. “We have to put an end to this.”. Lucy McBath, a Georgia representative whose son died in a shooting in 2012, wrote on X: “Too many people continue to experience the pain of gun violence. No family should have to go through this.”. As for Donald Trump, he offered his condolences on his social network before adding: “These beloved children were taken from us far too soon by a sick and deranged monster”.
