Georgia high school shooting suspect denies making online threats last year

WINDERS, Georgia — A teenager accused of opening fire at a Georgia high school denied threatening to shoot up the school when police questioned him last year about a threatening post on the social media site Discord, according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday.

Conflicting evidence about the origin of the post prevented investigators from arresting anyone, the report said.

A 14-year-old suspect has been charged as an adult in the shooting Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta that killed four people and wounded nine. He is accused of using an assault rifle to kill two students and two teachers in a hallway outside an algebra classroom.

The same teen was questioned in May 2023 by a sheriff’s investigator in neighboring Jackson County, who had received a tip from the FBI that the boy, then 13, “possibly threatened a shooting at the high school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to a Jackson County sheriff’s report obtained by The Associated Press.

The FBI tip pointed to a Discord account linked to an email address associated with the Georgia teen, the report said. However, the boy told a sheriff’s investigator that he “would never say anything like that, even in jest.”

The investigator wrote that no arrests were made due to “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which included Russian-language profile information and a digital evidence trail indicating it was accessed in multiple cities in Georgia as well as Buffalo, New York.

Thursday’s attack was the latest in dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including notably deadly ones in Newtown, Conn.; Parkland, Fla.; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have sparked heated debates over gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children grow up trained in shooting drills. But the nation’s gun laws have changed little.

Classes were canceled at a Georgia high school on Thursday, but some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with their heads bowed.

“I’m upset, I’m crying all the time,” said Linda Carter, who was shocked by the massacre even though she has no children who attend the school. “These children should not have lost their lives. These parents, these adults, these teachers should not have lost their lives yesterday.”

When the suspect slipped out of the classroom Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath thought her quiet classmate, who had recently transferred, was leaving the school again. But he returned later and tried to return to class. Some students went to open the locked door, but instead they retreated.

“I suspect they saw something, but for some reason they didn’t open the door,” Sayarath said.

The teen then turned the gun on people in the hallway, authorities said.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said he was charged with the murders of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53.

The teenager was scheduled to be transferred to a regional juvenile detention center on Thursday.

When the teenager was not allowed to return to the classroom, Sayarath said she heard a series of 10 to 15 shots. The math students fell to the floor and crawled, looking for a safe corner to hide.

Two school resource officers confronted the shooter within minutes of the shots being reported, Hosey said. The teen immediately surrendered.

At least nine other people — eight students and a teacher at the Winder school — were taken to hospitals. All were expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said. Authorities were still investigating how the teenager obtained the gun and brought it into the school of about 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of the growing Atlanta metropolitan area.

“All the students who had to watch their teachers and classmates die, those who had to limp out of school, looked terrified,” Sayarat said.

Kassidy Reed joined a steady stream of classmates seeking counseling Thursday at school system offices. The 17-year-old senior said she had trouble sleeping Wednesday night after the shootings.

“The first thing you think when you wake up is someone lost their coach, someone lost their father, someone lost their best friend,” Reed said.

Reed was taking a test Wednesday morning with a few other people in the hallway when she heard gunshots just around the corner. A teacher across the hall opened a door so they could sneak into the chemistry lab. Reed ducked under a table next to a classmate whose cross necklace they were holding in their hands as they prayed.

They were close enough to hear police ordering someone to get on the ground, followed by what sounded like handcuffs being applied. As officers escorted the lab students to safety, Reed said she saw blood in the hallway and what appeared to be a disassembled firearm lying next to the body.

It was the 30th mass killing in the U.S. this year, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 people died in those killings, which are defined as incidents in which four or more people die within 24 hours, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.

There have already been cases in which someone who was once on the FBI’s radar but was not arrested has committed violence.

A month before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at a Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018, the bureau received a tip that he had talked about committing a mass shooting. The FBI also investigated a tip about a person who was later convicted in the fatal shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado in 2022.

The pattern underscores the challenges law enforcement faces in trying to determine when disturbing behavior escalates into crime. Investigators sift through tens of thousands of tips each year to try to determine which ones might pose a real threat. Cases like the Georgia school shooting raise new questions about whether more investigative work could have prevented the violence.

The sheriff’s report says its investigator spoke with the boy and his father on May 21, 2023. The father said he had a hunting gun at home, but his son did not have unsupervised access to it.

The teen told the investigator that he previously used a Discord account but stopped using the platform “because too many people were hacking into his account.”

The phone number associated with the account was linked to another person in a different Georgia town, the report said. The account’s profile name, written in Russian, was translated to Lanza. Investigators noted that Adam Lanza was the shooter in the 2012 shooting that killed 20 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The sheriff’s office notified local schools to continue monitoring the teen, but the investigator said he “could not substantiate the information I received from the FBI to take further action.”

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Associated Press reporters contributed to this report: Charlotte Kramon, Sharon Johnson, Mike Stewart and Erik Verduzco in Winder; Trenton Daniel and Beatrice Dupuy in New York; Eric Tucker in Washington; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Kate Brumback and Jeff Martin in Atlanta; and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska.