Police have released a picture of a teenager suspected of shooting four people dead in the US state of Georgia.
Two teachers and two students were killed in the attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, on Wednesday.
Colt Gray, 14, surrendered when “engaged by school resource officers inside the school”, Barrow County police said.
He is accused of committing the fatal shootings with an assault-style rifle outside his algebra classroom.
One of his classmates, Lyela Sayarath, said she heard 10 to 15 gunshots.
Kassidy Reed, 17, joined classmates seeking counselling on Thursday and said she had struggled to sleep.
After the shooting, she said she saw blood in the hallway and what looked like a disassembled firearm lying next to a body.
“The first thing you wake up and think about is like, somebody lost the coach, somebody lost their dad, somebody lost their best friend,” she said.
Students and staff gather next to a football field at the school. Pic: Reuters
Nine people – one teacher and eight students – were wounded in the shooting. They remained in hospital on Thursday, NBC News, Sky News’s partner network, reported.
All are expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.
Neither body camera videos nor audio will be released to “protect the integrity of the investigation”, the sheriff’s office said.
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What we know about Colt Gray
School shooting victims named
Following a tip off from the FBI, Gray and his father were interviewed last year in connection with online threats about a school shooting made on the gaming platform Discord.
They denied making the comments, investigators said.
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School shooting suspect previously investigated by FBI
The case was closed after neither Gray could be connected to the Discord account, while no grounds were found to confiscate the family’s guns, according to police reports released by the sheriff’s office.
Information on the Discord account – which had profile information in Russian and a digital evidence trail indicating it had been accessed in different Georgia cities and Buffalo, New York – was “inconsistent”, an investigator said.
“This case was worked, and at the time the boy was 13, and it wasn’t enough to substantiate,” Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said.
“We did not drop the ball at all on this. We did all we could do with what we had at the time.”
Gray’s father told officials he had hunting guns locked in a safe in the house and his son did not have access to them.
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Gray has been charged as an adult over the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, according to Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
He is due to make his first court appearance on Friday.
Classes at the school were cancelled on Thursday, though some people arrived with flowers.
