Whenever there is a school shooting, I say to myself, “Wait for it. They will say there were signs and red flags.” Often, those red flags come from school staff or other students.
The FBI has released new details about the 14-year-old boy accused of killing two students and two teachers and injuring at least nine others at Apalachee High School on Wednesday in Winder, Georgia. The majority of those injured were teachers.
In a post on X, the FBI said that in May of 2023, it received “several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time” and that the threats contained images of guns.
The sheriff’s office identified a suspect, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. “The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online,” the post said.
The sheriff’s office alerted local schools to continue to monitor “the subject,” but they felt there was no probable cause for arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action. The FBI confirmed that the then-13-year-old is the same teenager who was taken into custody after Wednesday’s shooting.
According to research by the National Institute of Justice, most school shooters exhibit outward signs of crisis, whether it be through social media or other means.
The government’s research indicates shooters “often publicly broadcast a high degree of personal instability and an inability to cope in their current mental state.”
“FBI research tells us that in the case of school shooters, where we looked at actual shootings and the shooters, 92% of the student shooters conveyed that information. They spoke words, and they did actions that their classmates saw.”
The National Institute of Justice also said that “80% of those who conduct mass school shootings stole their weapon from a family member.” In the case of Wednesday’s school shooting, the FBI said the suspect’s father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the suspect did not have unsupervised access to them.
I guarantee that in the next few weeks, more teachers and students will come forward to say they saw unusual behavior, writings, etc., and reported it, but nothing was done.
Many school shootings are preventable by listening to teachers when they report a concern. Here is an article on five major school shootings that could have been prevented.