WINDER, Ga. (AP) — The teen charged with opening fire at a Georgia high school denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when police interviewed him last year about a menacing post on the social media site Discord, according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday.
Conflicting evidence on the post's origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report said.
The 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-style rifle to kill two students and two teachers in the hallway outside his algebra classroom.
The same teenager was interviewed in May 2023 by a sheriff’s investigator from neighboring Jackson County who received a tip from the FBI that the boy, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the Jackson County sheriff’s report obtained by The Associated Press.
The FBI's tip pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to the Georgia teen, the report said. But the boy told a sheriff's investigator “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner.”
The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a digital evidence trail indicating it had been accessed in different Georgia cities as well as Buffalo, New York.
The attack Thursday was the latest among dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have set off fervent debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to active-shooter drills. But there has been little change to national gun laws.
Classes were canceled Thursday at the Georgia high school, though some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with heads bowed.
“I’m upset, I’m crying constantly,” said Linda Carter, who was shaken by the rampage even though she has no children who attend the school. “These kids shouldn’t have lost their lives. These parents, these adults, these teachers should not have lost their lives yesterday.”
When the suspect slipped out of class Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath figured her quiet classmate who recently transferred was skipping school again. But he returned later and wanted back into the room. Some students went to open the locked door but instead backed away.
“I’m guessing they saw something, but for some reason, they didn’t open the door,” Sayarath said.
The teen then turned the gun on people in a hallway, authorities said.
He has been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey.
The teen was to be taken Thursday to a regional youth detention facility.
When the teen was not allowed back into his classroom, Sayarath said she heard a barrage of 10 to 15 gunshots. The math students fell to the floor and crawled in search of a safe corner to hide.
Two school resource officers confronted the shooter within minutes after the gunshots were reported, Hosey said. The teen immediately surrendered.
At least nine other people — eight students and one teacher at the school in Winder — were taken to hospitals. All were expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said. Authorities were still looking into how the teen obtained the gun and got it into the school with about 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of metro Atlanta’s ever-expanding sprawl.
