WINDER, Ga. (news agencies) — It was the middle of second period on Wednesday morning at Apalachee High School, and the boy who few knew slipped out of his algebra class in J Hall again. That didn’t strike his fellow students as unusual.
“He got up sometime in the morning, and class continued as normal,” Lyela Sayarath said. “He was probably just skipping.”
Many teenagers weren’t quite awake at the high school near Winder, in rapidly suburbanizing Barrow County. Junior Julie Sandoval was dozing in her physics class as other students caught up on work. Sophomore Jacob King also dozed off, in world history, after a morning football practice.
But soon, terror and panic erupted as authorities say Colt Gray, the 14-year-old student who left class, returned to the hallway with an assault rifle and opened fire. Four people were killed and nine more hurt, seven of them shot, in the latest school shooting to shock the nation.
Gray is charged with four counts of murder. Authorities haven’t said yet where he got the weapon, how he brought it 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 around 10:20 a.m.
Law enforcement hasn’t said whether Gray was being sought before the shooting. “We’re still trying to clarify a lot of the timeline,” Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said Wednesday.
On Thursday, officials also arrested his father, Colin Gray, and charged him with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree murder and cruelty to children, saying he knowingly allowed his son to possess a gun.
At the school on Wednesday morning, the alert was sounded when several teachers set off their wearable panic buttons, which Sheriff Jud Smith said were distributed to staff only days earlier. That sparked a lockdown, and immediately a warning flashed on classroom smartboards across the sprawling school.
“The screen … said ‘hard lockdown’ in big red words, and the top light started flashing,” said Layla Ferrell, a junior who was in a food and nutrition class in another hall.
Many thought it was a drill. Georgia schools are required to complete at least one active shooter drill by Oct. 1 each year.
“I thought it was fake until my friend told me it wasn’t fake,” King said. He added, “They weren’t really acting like it was real.”
Some heard what sounded like a loud, metallic crash.
“It sounded more like punching a locker at first,” Ferrell said.
But those in J Hall had no doubt.
Sayarath said that when the suspect tried to return to class, a student saw what warrants describe as “black semi-automatic AR-15 style rifle” and refused to let him in. Classroom doors at the school lock automatically and must be opened from inside, a “hardening” precaution in America’s era of school shootings.
Kaylee Abner, a sophomore, said a student who left her geometry class to take a test elsewhere came racing back.
“She ran back inside, shuts the door and then we hear three gunshots,” Abner said.
Junior Landon Culver got a glimpse of the shooter after leaving algebra II.
“I was walking out to get water and I heard gunshots and I heard bullets going like by my head,” Culver said. “It looked like he was wearing a black hoodie and he had a AR and, I just, I didn’t really stick around too long to look.”
Marques Coleman Jr. told The Washington Post that the shooter leaned inside an open door of his algebra classroom and sprayed it with gunfire, hitting people including Christian Angulo, who died. Others were shot in the hall.
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