Shooter was known to authorities – father arrested

One day after another fatal gun attack on a school in the USA, the 14-year-old suspect has been officially charged with killing four people. The responsible investigative authority in the US state of Georgia announced on Thursday that the suspect would appear in court on Friday. The investigation into the gun attack at Apalachee High School around 70 kilometers northeast of Atlanta is “still active and ongoing,” the authority said on the online service X.

The student is accused of four counts of murder after he shot two other 14-year-old classmates and two teachers on Wednesday. Nine other people were injured in the attack. The local sheriff said all nine are on the mend and will make a full recovery.

The shooter will be tried as an adult, regardless of his age. US broadcaster CNN reported that the semi-automatic assault rifle used in the attack was a gift from the father.

The suspect in the shooting has apparently been targeted by authorities before. When questioned about a social media post last year, he denied threatening to carry out a massacre at a school, according to a report from the neighboring Jackson County Sheriff's Office released Thursday.

Conflicting evidence regarding the origin of the post prevented an arrest, the report states. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and found nothing that would have warranted prosecution of the suspect at the time. There was no oversight, Mangum told the AP. “We did everything we could with what we had at the time.”

When a Jackson County investigator interviewed G. last year, his father said the boy had suffered from his parents' separation and was often teased at school. The teen regularly used guns and went hunting with his father, who photographed him with deer blood on his cheeks. “He knows how dangerous guns are and what they can do and how to use them and how not to use them,” the boy's father said at the time, according to a transcript of the authorities' report.

The questioning of the teenager was preceded by a tip from the FBI that the then 13-year-old may have threatened to carry out a school massacre the following day. The threat was published on the Discord platform, which is popular with gamers, according to the sheriff's office report. There were indications of a connection to a Discord user account that was linked to an email address belonging to G. The boy said, however, that he would never say something like that, not even as a joke.

No arrest was made due to “inconsistent information” about the Discord account. The profile information was partly written in Russian and digital traces indicate that the user account was accessed from various cities in Georgia, as well as from Buffalo, New York.

US President Joe Biden told reporters in the US state of Wisconsin on Thursday that parents must be held accountable if they “give their children access to these guns”. “How can you have an assault rifle, a gun, in a house that is not locked away and you know your child knows where it is?” complained Biden.