The mother of a student at the Georgia high school where a teen allegedly killed four people says information indicating staff were warned he was having a crisis shows the shooting could have been prevented.
“The school failed them, that they could have prevented these deaths and they didn’t,” Rabecca Sayarath said Sunday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “I truly, truly feel that way.”
Sayarath’s daughter, Lyela, told reporters on Wednesday, the day of the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, that administrators appeared to be looking for the 14-year-old who has been charged with four counts of murder, before the gunfire began.
Others, though, are declining to blame school or law enforcement officials.
“I’m not going to referee or second-guess what happened with the authorities the other night,” U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I applaud our first responders. When others are running away from danger, they run toward the danger in order to do the best they can.”
Officials say the suspect shot and killed students Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. Eight other students and a teacher were injured—seven of them shot—and are expected to recover.
Annie Brown told The Washington Post that her sister, the suspect’s mother, texted her saying she spoke with a school counselor and warned staff of an “extreme emergency” before the killings. Brown said Marcee Gray urged them to “immediately” find her son to check on him.
Brown provided screen shots of the text exchange to the newspaper, which also reported that a call log from the family’s shared phone plan showed a call was made to the school at 9:50 a.m. Warrants for the suspect’s arrest say the shooting started at 10:20 a.m.
Brown confirmed the reporting to The Associated Press on Saturday in text messages but declined to provide further comment.
Marcee Gray expressed remorse for the shootings Saturday to The Washington Post and The New York Post.
“I am so, so sorry and can not fathom the pain and suffering they are going through right now,” Gray told The Washington Post in a text.
“It’s horrible. It’s absolutely horrible,” Gray told The New York Post outside her father’s home in Fitzgerald, Ga., about 150 miles south of Atlanta.
Charles Polhamus, the boy’s grandfather, has told multiple news outlets that Marcee Gray got a text from her son on Wednesday saying he was sorry. Polhamus told CNN that Marcee Gray drove to Winder, more than 200 miles from Fitzgerald, immediately after the shooting.
The Washington Post also reported that texts show relatives contacted the school about the boy’s mental health a week before the shooting, and that Brown told a relative he was having “homicidal and suicidal thoughts.” The newspaper reported that the teen’s grandmother, Deborah Polhamus, met with a school counselor to request help.
The boy “starts with the therapist tomorrow,” Polhamus wrote in a text to Brown after that meeting.
Investigators haven’t said what they believe might have motivated the suspect or whether they believe he targeted particular victims.
Authorities have said the suspect’s father, Colin Gray, gave him access to the semiautomatic AR-15 style rifle used in the shooting. It’s not clear how the suspect brought the gun to campus or what he did with it in the two hours between school starting at 8:15 a.m. and when shots first rang out.
Colin Gray became the first parent of a school shooting suspect to be charged in Georgia, District Attorney Brad Smith said Friday. He’s accused of second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and cruelty to children for providing his son with the rifle.
Colin Gray is jailed in Barrow County after declining to seek bail in a brief court hearing Friday in Winder. The suspect is being held in a juvenile detention center after declining to seek bail. Neither has been indicted or entered a plea.
Lyela Sayarath said Wednesday that the suspect had left her algebra classroom and that she believed he was skipping class.
In the minutes before the shooting, a female administrator came to her class looking for a student with the same last name and almost identical first name as the suspect, she said. That other student was in the bathroom, but the administrator demanded to see his bag. That student returned with his bag moments later, Sayarath said, and told her that administrators had concluded he wasn’t the student they were looking for.
Someone also called the teacher on the intercom, apparently asking about the suspect, Sayarath said. She said as the intercom buzzed a second time, the teacher responded, “Oh he’s here,” seeing the suspect outside the classroom door.
When students went to open the door, which automatically locks from the inside when closed, Sayarath said they backed away. She said she saw the suspect turn away through the window of the door and then she said she heard gunshots—“10 or 15 of them at once, back-to-back.”
Rabecca Sayarath, Lyela’s mother, has said she believed the school erred by sending an unarmed administrator to look for the suspect instead of one of Apalachee High’s armed school resource officers.
When she questioned Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith about her daughter’s account at a Wednesday night news conference, Smith cautioned, “With all due respect, ma’am, I think your information is incorrect.”
It’s unclear if Barrow County school authorities knew before the shooting that the suspect and Colin Gray previously had been interviewed by a sheriff’s deputy in neighboring Jackson County in May 2023 after a report of an online threat to shoot up a middle school that the suspect, then 13, attended.
The suspect told the deputy that “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” according to a report filed by investigators. No action was taken because of inconsistent information about the social media account used to make the threats.
Colin Gray told the investigator back then that the suspect had access to unloaded guns in the house but knew “how to use them and not use them.” He also said his son had struggled since he and his wife separated and that his son was picked on in school.
Nicole Valles, a spokesperson for the Barrow County school district, declined to comment Sunday in response to emailed questions seeking more details about what may have happened before the shooting.
“Because this is an active investigation and now court proceedings have begun, we are not commenting on specific details,” Valles wrote, referring questions to the district attorney.
Smith didn’t immediately respond to emails Sunday with similar questions, while the Georgia Bureau of Investigation referred requests for comment to the district attorney.
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