One academic said law enforcement should have taken “additional assertive steps” to prevent Wednesday’s tragedy.
Academics are divided on whether law enforcement could have done more to prevent Wednesday’s shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, which left four people dead and another nine injured.
Police have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray with four counts of felony murder related to the shooting, and he is expected to be tried as an adult. His father, 54-year-old Colin Gray, has also been charged with two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Colin Gray “knowingly allowed his son . to possess a gun”, which Colt is accused of using in the shooting.
The four people killed in the shooting are Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, two 14-year-old students, and teachers Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie. Authorities said the attack was carried out with an AR-style platform rifle. According to the FBI, in 2023 Colt and his father were interviewed by sheriff’s deputies following anonymous online threats regarding a school shooting, which officials linked to the then-13-year-old boy.
Colt denied he had made the threats, the FBI said, adding, “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.” Officials “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject.”
Speaking to Newsweek, Edward Taylor, an expert in adolescent mental health at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, who has covered school shootings, said the police should have taken “additional assertive steps” after Colt came to their attention in 2023.
He said: “At another point in time, before school shootings became part of the American identity, we could say that the police fulfilled their responsibility by interviewing the adolescent and father. However, in modern United States culture, it would be helpful for police investigators to take additional assertive steps.
