The death toll included two students, who were also 14, and two teachers, according to police. Officers arrested the lone suspect after a brief confrontation and said he would be charged with murder and tried as an adult. Law enforcement previously had interviewed the suspect after receiving anonymous reports last year about online posts threatening violence at an unnamed school, the area’s local FBI office said. They did not have enough evidence to take further action, Washington Post reports.
The violence tore through Apalachee High School during the second month of classes, as students returned from a long holiday weekend.
It was the deadliest US school shooting of the year and the first since June, according to a database maintained by The Washington Post. Officials described a horrific scene on campus as they navigated the bloodshed in search of casualties.
“We are still going classroom to classroom — and it’s a big high school — looking for bodies,” Kenny Cooper, the coroner for Barrow County, where Winder is located, said at midday. “It’s terrible. Please pray for us.”
The victims were identified as students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53. No more fatalities are expected, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said at a news conference Wednesday night. “All of our victims that are at the hospital are going to make it and going to recover well, as we’ve been told,” he said.
Winder now enters the annals of American communities forever scarred by mass gun violence, a national epidemic that unfolds everywhere from big cities to small towns. It is uniquely terrifying when it strikes a school, where students haunted by past high-profile shootings undergo repeated drills about how to survive if gunfire breaks out. In interviews Wednesday, students did not appear to be terribly surprised that the bloodshed had visited their campus.
MNA/PR
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