Four people were killed and nine others were injured in a shooting on Wednesday morning (4) at Apalachee High School in Georgia, United States. The case was the deadliest of its kind this year.
The suspect in the attack was identified as a 14-year-old student who will be charged with murder and tried as an adult, authorities said.
He was taken into police custody and arrested later Wednesday and is a student at Apalachee School.
It is not known whether the attacker had any connection to his victims, according to Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith, although authorities stressed that would be determined by the investigation.
“The father stated that he had hunting weapons at home, but that the suspect did not have unsupervised access to them,” the statement added.
The teen was questioned by authorities last year in connection with “anonymous tips about online threats to commit an attack at a school,” according to a joint statement from the FBI, the Atlanta-based National Bureau of Investigation and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.
The student denied making threats online, the agencies noted; however, the authorities’ statement noted that the online threats included photographs of weapons.
Another investigator wrote that this earlier case was closed because it could not be proven.
At the time, “there was no probable cause for arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action at the local, state or federal levels,” the FBI in Atlanta and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office said in their joint statement.
The student is currently being held at the Gainesville Regional Juvenile Detention Center, Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice communications director Glenn Allen told the Associated Press. CNN .
He is due to have a first hearing this Friday (6).
Witness sat next to suspect
Lyela Sayarath, 16, told CNN that the alleged attacker sat next to her in an algebra class.
She said the student left class early, around 9:45 a.m. She thought he was going to the bathroom, but didn’t ask permission — so she thought he might be skipping class.
Near the end of class, someone asked the professor over the loudspeaker to check his email, Sayarath said.
Shortly afterward, the suspect was standing outside the classroom, which was locked, the girl said. Another student who approached the door jumped back when she saw that he was carrying a gun.
“I think he realized we weren’t going to let him in. And I think the classroom next door had the door open, so I think he started shooting into the classroom,” he alleged.
At first, Sayarath told CNN, she heard a burst of gunshots – between 10 and 15 – and then they came “one after the other”. The students fell to the ground and crawled to a corner.
“It seemed like he hadn’t planned very well or wasn’t very good with a gun, because he didn’t try to shoot at our door, he went to the next one,” he commented.
This content was originally published in What we know about the suspect in the shooting at a school in the United States on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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