4 dead in Georgia high school shooting, officials say
By Emmett Lindner and Remy Tumin
GEORGIA – Four people were killed in a shooting on the campus of a Georgia high school Wednesday (4), authorities said. A suspect was alive and in custody, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said on social media.
Nine people were also injured, authorities said, and at least one was flown by helicopter to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, one of the major trauma centres in the region.
Officials in Barrow County, Georgia, said that a shooting happened at around 9:30 a.m. at Apalachee High School, near Winder, which is roughly 50 miles from the centre of Atlanta.
“What you see behind us is an evil thing today,” Sheriff Jud Smith of Barrow County told reporters during a brief news conference outside of the school Wednesday, describing a chaotic situation where investigators were still trying to get a grasp of what happened.
“Please let us get the facts that we need to make sure we get this right,” he said, adding, “Every minute, it’s developing.”
Smith said that one person was in custody but did not share any information about the age of the individual or that person’s connection to the school, nor did he disclose whether authorities were searching for other suspects.
The streets surrounding the school were clogged Wednesday with law enforcement officers and emergency responders who had swarmed in from around the region. Federal investigators, as well as the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, were on the scene.
Parents, some parking more than a mile away, walked toward the school, anxious to reconnect with their children. Hundreds of students, who had been evacuated from the school, were waiting on the school’s football field.
Gov. Brian P. Kemp said on social media that he was directing all available state resources “to respond to the incident” at the school in Barrow County.
The White House said in a statement that President Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting and that the administration would continue coordinating with federal, state and local officials.
The shooting happened on the fifth full week of school at Apalachee High School, a rural campus with roughly 1,800 students in ninth through 12th grades.
Several schools in the area were under lockdown Wednesday morning as authorities responded to the shooting, according to a spokesperson for the school and the sheriff’s department.
The shooting has also prompted schools across the region to ramp up security as a precaution. In Atlanta, which is more than an hour away, Mayor Andre Dickens said that the police force for the city’s public schools would “bolster patrols” for the rest of the day “out of an abundance of caution.”
-New York Times
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