14-year-old kills 4 in US school shooting

ATLANTA, the United States — A 14-year-old boy killed two fellow students and two teachers and wounded nine others in a shooting at a Georgia high school on Wednesday, jolting the United States with the first mass campus shooting since the start of the school year.

The suspect, who had been interviewed by law enforcement last year over online threats about committing a school shooting, was taken into custody shortly after the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, investigators said.

He was identified as Colt Gray, 14, and will be charged and tried as an adult, Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, told a news conference.

Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said the gunman, armed with an "AR platform style weapon", or semiautomatic rifle, was quickly confronted by deputies assigned to the school and that the suspect immediately got on the ground and surrendered.

Once under arrest, the suspect was speaking with investigators, who believe he was acting alone, although they declined to say if they knew what motivated him.

Officials identified those killed as students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39 and Christina Irimie, 53. All nine of those hospitalized were expected to recover, Smith told reporters.

"Pure evil did what happened today," Smith said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, later issued a statement revealing that it had investigated online threats to commit a school shooting in 2023 and local law enforcement interviewed a 13-year-old and his father in nearby Jackson County. The statement did not identify the teen, but Georgia officials said the statement was in connection to the person in custody.

Previous investigation

"The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online. Jackson County alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject," the FBI said, adding that there was no probable cause to make an arrest.

The shooting led to the outpouring of grief that follows in a country where such outbursts occur with some regularity.

People in Winder, a city of 18,000 some 80 kilometers northeast of Atlanta, gathered in a park for a prayer vigil on Wednesday night.

US President Joe Biden said he was mourning the dead.

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

Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee for president, called the shooting a "senseless tragedy".

The carnage has intensified the pitched debate over gun laws and the US Constitution's Second Amendment, which enshrines the right "to keep and bear arms".

The US has seen hundreds of shootings inside schools and colleges in the past two decades, with the deadliest resulting in more than 30 deaths at Virginia Tech in 2007.

This year, there have been at least 384 mass shootings — defined as a shooting involving at least four victims, dead or wounded — across the country, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Agencies via Xinhua