A 14-year-old teenager was identified as the suspected attacker of Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, which occurred on Wednesday. The young man is named Colt Gray.
"He will be charged with murder and tried as an adult," Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, told CNN.
The third-year Apalachee High School student Lyela Sayarath told CNN that she shared classes with the alleged shooter and that he left the classroom at the beginning of her Algebra 1 class.
Upon returning, near the end of the class, he knocked on the door to re-enter. However, another student noticed that he was carrying a weapon when going to open the door, so they did not let him in.
That was when he went to the adjacent classroom and opened fire with an AR-15 style rifle, leaving two teachers and two students dead.
The victims were identified as Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie, both mathematics teachers; as well as students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14 years old.
The hospitalized individuals are expected to "make a full recovery," said Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith at a press conference on Wednesday night.
The investigation into this unfortunate incident is still ongoing. Hosey himself noted that "we are still trying to clarify much of the timeline from the moment he arrived at school today to the incident."
However, in a joint statement from the Atlanta FBI and the Jackson County Sheriff's Office, they admitted that the alleged shooter was interrogated by authorities last year in relation to "several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unspecified location and time," but they did not have enough evidence for his arrest, they added.
The father of the teenager claimed to have hunting guns and that his son did not have access to them.
"The county of Jackson alerted local schools to continue monitoring the issue," they report.
"Students across the country are learning to duck and cover instead of how to read and write. We can no longer accept this as normal," said U.S. President Joe Biden about this tragic event.
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