A 14-year-old boy has killed two fellow students, two teachers and wounded nine others in a shooting at a Georgia high school, 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 in 2023 over online threats about committing a school shooting, was taken into custody shortly after the shooting on Wednesday 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 press 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, but they declined to say if they knew what motivated him.
Officials identified those killed as two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and two teachers, Richard Aspenwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53. All nine of those hospitalised were expected to recover, Smith told reporters.
"Pure evil did what happened today," Smith said.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation 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 subject 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 subject in custody.
"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 revived both the national debate about gun control and 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 80km northeast of Atlanta, gathered in a park for a prayer vigil later Wednesday night.
Some leaned on each other or bowed their heads in prayer, while others lit candles to honour the dead.
"We are all hurting. Because when something affects one of us it affects us all," said Power Evans, a city councilman who addressed the gathering.
"I know that here tonight, all of are going to come together. We're going to love on one another. ... We're all family. We're all neighbours."
The White House said in a statement that President Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting "and his administration will continue coordinating with federal, state, and local officials as we receive more information".
"Jill and I are mourning the deaths of those whose lives were cut short due to more senseless gun violence and thinking of all of the survivors whose lives are forever changed," Biden said in a statement, calling on Republicans to work with Democrats to pass "common-sense gun safety legislation".
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee for president, called the shooting a "senseless tragedy".
"We've gotta stop it. We have to end this epidemic of gun violence," Harris said at the start of a campaign event in New Hampshire.
The shooting was the first "planned attack" at a school this autumn, said David Riedman, who runs the K-12 School Shooting Database. Apalachee students returned to school in August. Many other students in the US are returning this week.
The US has seen hundreds of shootings inside schools and colleges in the past two decades, with the deadliest resulting in over 30 deaths at Virginia Tech in 2007. 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."
