Four people killed, two teachers and two students, and nine people hospitalized. This is the toll of the shooting that took place Wednesday morning at Apalachee High School, in Winder, a city of eighteen thousand inhabitants an hour’s drive from Atlanta, Georgia. The killer is called Colt Gray, he is 14 years old, is a student at the same high school and wanted to commit a massacre in class. The motive is not clear at the moment, but as the hours pass the details paint a disturbing scenario. A classmate, Lyela Sayarath, said she saw the boy leave the classroom at the beginning of the algebra lesson, around 9:45. She thought he wanted to go to the bathroom, but the boy strangely had not brought his pass to get back in. After more than half an hour he returned, knocking on the door that closes automatically from the inside for security reasons. A girl approached to open but moved away in fear, as soon as she saw that the boy was armed. At that point they heard the shots fired in rapid succession. The boy had entered the classroom next door. From that moment began the nightmare that marked another tragic routine of American school life.
Within a few minutes, the police had surrounded the area, while hundreds of students were either barricaded in their classrooms or had fled. The officers, in fact, had been alerted earlier, when the switchboard of a police station had received a strange phone call: an anonymous voice had announced that shots would soon be fired in five schools in the city. The first was Apalachee, a center that hosts almost two thousand students. At first, local media spoke of about thirty injured, while the official toll says nine, but the discrepancy is linked to the fact that some people, with minor injuries, were not hospitalized. According to the police, there is no connection between the young killer and the victims: they were chosen at random. The outcome could have been worse if the officers had not intervened quickly..
Gray surrendered immediately. The boy was arrested and taken to jail. He was charged with multiple murder. “He will be treated like an adult,” said Chris Hosey, head of the investigative bureau. The vice president of the United States and Democratic presidential candidate for November Kamala Harris Calls It a ‘Senseless Tragedy’President Joe Biden renewed his call for legislation to ban assault weapons. Donald Trump called the shooter a “monster.” Many congressional representatives have sent their “prayers” to the families of the victims, a ritual that is repeated after every massacre.
According to Gun Archive, which tracks all gun-related violence in the United States, there have been 385 mass shootings so far in 2024, meaning at least four people have been injured or killed. That includes the one in Winder. The number of days that have passed since the beginning of the year is 248, an average of one and a half massacres per day. Since the beginning of the year, Winder is the forty-fifth school where shots have been fired. Of those, 32 were in schools up to high school, 12 were in universities and colleges. Last year there were 82, a record number since 2008.