(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The 14-year-old student who opened fire at a Georgia high school and killed four people on Wednesday had been on the FBI’s radar since at least May 2023, officials admitted.
“In May 2023, the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center received several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time. The online threats contained photographs of guns.
Within 24 hours, the FBI determined the online post originated in Georgia, and the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office referred the information to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office for action,” the FBI said in a statement Wednesday night.
“The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office located a possible subject, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. 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 bureau added.
Yesterday's school shooter had been on the FBI's radar, but you probably already knew that pic.twitter.com/2SZ9wZkKCS
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) September 5, 2024
“At that time, there was no probable cause for arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state, or federal levels.”
The teen is still alive, and has been charged as an adult with using an assault-style rifle to kill two Apalachee High School students and two teachers in the hallway outside his algebra classroom, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference.
The dead were identified as two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder, about an hour’s drive from Atlanta. Killed were two other 14-year-olds, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and instructors Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said in a nighttime news conference.
At least nine other people — eight students and one teacher — were taken to hospitals with injuries. All were expected to survive.
Wednesday’s shooting 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.
Before Wednesday, there had been 29 mass killings in the U.S. so far this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 people have died in those killings, which are defined as incidents in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.
Wednesday’s tragedy was also at least the 24th time that a mass shooter that had been on the FBI’s radar prior to his attack.
Prominent examples of mass shooters who were on the FBI’s “radar” include Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza, Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen and Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz.
In Lanza’s case, FBI agents had reportedly previously questioned him for hacking computers.
With Orlando shooter Mateen, the FBI reportedly went as far as investigating him in direct relation to possibly being a terrorist threat—twice. “But the F.B.I. soon ended its examination of Mr. Mateen after finding no evidence that he posed a terrorist threat to his community,” the New York Times reported in June 2016.
Matteen’s father was also an FBI informant for more than a decade, as was reported by NPR in March 2018.
Then, there’s Parkland. In 2018, The New York Times report that “The F.B.I. received a tip last month from someone close to Nikolas Cruz that he owned a gun and had talked of committing a school shooting, the bureau revealed Friday, but it acknowledged that it had failed to investigate.”
Additionally, Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron was possibly communicating with a retired federal agent within as little as 30 minutes of his killing spree. Gendron’s possible links to a retired federal agent are more bizarre when coupled with a July 2019 story from the Buffalo News about FBI agents tracking potential mass shooters in the area.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
