News that the FBI received a cluster of 2023 tips about a student accused of killing four people in his Winder, Ga., high school Wednesday sparked a cascade of questions about whether the attack could have been avoided and how it could inform future school-violence prevention efforts.
Law enforcement authorities said the subject of those tips, now a 14-year-old student, shot and killed two classmates and two teachers at Apalachee High School. Investigators were searching for a motive Thursday and probing how the suspect, who is now in police custody, attained a weapon used in the killings, which authorities described as an AR-15 style rifle. The accused shooter was charged with four counts of felony murder on Thursday.
Hours after the attack, the FBI’s Atlanta field office revealed it had received in May 2023 “several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time.”
The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject,” after they could not definitively link it to the boy, then 13, the statement said. The New York Times reported Thursday that the suspect attended Jefferson Middle School at the time, which is in Jackson County, a school district that abuts Barrow County, where the Sept. 4 shooting took place. It’s not clear what, if any, information was shared between the two school systems.
Experts on school-based violence prevention cautioned against a rush to judgment about the 2023 tip and response from law enforcement and educators as so much remained unknown about the suspect and his history.
“We’ve got to not jump to conclusions about this particular case,” said Dewey Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia who studies school violence prevention. “We are going to learn a lot more in the next couple of weeks that is going to tell us how this could have been prevented. I hope we will take steps that focus on prevention, not reaction.”
That caution comes as researchers stress the importance of comprehensive school-based threat assessment, a team-based approach to analyzing reports of threats and possible harm that Cornell helped pioneer following the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
Limited information provided about school shooting tip
The nature of the 2023 tips—and the young suspect’s educational path—would add complications to any school response.
The suspect was enrolled in a different school in a different district at the time officers investigated, and the tip came during summer break, the Times reported. It’s unclear if school officials who got that tip did any specific monitoring or outreach with the student the following year. As a freshman, he would only have attended about a month of classes at Apalachee High School when the shooting took place. The school year started Aug. 1.
In response to the 2023 anonymous tips, Jackson County sheriff’s deputies interviewed the suspect, who denied making the threats, and his father, who said his son did not have “unsupervised access” to “hunting guns” that were in the house, the FBI statement said.
The New York Times further reported that the tips came from three users with internet addresses as far away as Australia, who reported that a user in a chat group on the social media site Discord had threatened to “shoot up a middle school.”
Officials tracked the email address associated with that user to the Apalachee shooting suspect. The username, written in Russian, translated to spell out the name of a gunman who shot and killed 26 people at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in 2012, Jackson County deputies found. The child denied making the post and said he had deleted a previous Discord account, and he and his father denied speaking Russian, according to a file reviewed by the Times.
Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum told the Times Thursday that her office investigated the tips as far as it could and reported the information to the student’s middle school. Investigators found no cause for criminal charges.
“It’s not like we didn’t investigate it,” she said. “It’s not just that we didn’t do anything.”
Georgia is also one of 29 states without extreme risk protection laws, commonly known as red flag laws, that allow courts to suspend an individual’s access to weapons if they are deemed a threat to themselves or others.
Schools face complications with threat assessment
Over the past decade, schools have increasingly urged students to report concerns about harm or threats to adults, and have developed more comprehensive strategies for handling those reports.
That strategy is based on repeatedly reaffirmed findings that most school shooters “leak” their plans beforehand, showing signs of their intentions or even directly warning friends or family members.
Threat assessment is a formal process through which a team of educators, student support personnel, and school administrators analyze reports of threatening student behavior, determine their severity, and set a plan in place to respond. For example, a student may receive counseling to prevent self-harm. Threats deemed imminent—like those that involve specific details like dates and locations—are referred to law enforcement for immediate response.
Eighty-five percent of public schools said they had a behavioral threat assessment team “or other formal group of persons to identify students who might be a potential risk for violent or harmful behavior toward themselves or others” in the 2023-24 school year, federal data show. Seventy-one percent of those schools reported that they have had students who were found to be a potential risk to themselves, and 49 percent reported that they have had students found to be a potential risk toward others.
“We circle the wagons,” said Elizabeth Brown, former principal of Forest High School in Ocala, Fla., who took that role shortly after an active shooter opened fire in the school’s hallways in 2018, severely injuring one student. “If there is a need for a person in that meeting, they are gathered and we immediately go into serving the needs of that student, as well as keeping our students safe.”
But, while many schools say they use threat assessment, there is wide variation in whether they follow evidence-based practices, what supports they provide students, and how they identify risks, Cornell said.
“Schools are overstressed and understaffed,” Cornell said. “Often, threat assessment is just seen as one more thing that people have to do, added onto their regular responsibilities. They may attend some training, but we know that after the training, they don’t actually implement what they were trained. It has to be more than a token effort.”
Educators, and even trained law enforcement officers, also vary in what they perceive as threatening student behavior, researchers have found.
“There is such a volume of threats these days on social media against schools,” said Pauline Moore, a researcher at the RAND Corporation who has studied school violence prevention. “These create a lot of noise that make it difficult for schools and their law enforcement officers to determine what is real and what is a hoax.”
If a school receives a report from law enforcement that a student had denied making an unspecified online threat, as was the case in Georgia, a threat assessment team may reach out to that student’s teachers to determine if they had noticed any other troubling behavior, Moore said. They may even take simple steps, like assigning a staff member to check in with the student every morning so he feels connected to school and has a trusted adult he can ask for help, she said.
But efforts like that are often hampered by a lack of counselors, student support staff, and funding, Moore said.
School leaders say prevention work is complex
Principals who’ve led schools after shootings said the work of preventing and responding to violence is complex.
“My heart aches for the school leaders, because they’re constantly going to be asking themselves questions: Was there something that we missed? Where did communication break?” said Andy McGill, an assistant principal who helped talk down an active shooter at West Liberty-Salem High School in Salem, Ohio, in 2017. “All these things are going to be running 100 miles an hour in their brain that they may never have the answer for. That leads to a lot of sleepless nights.”
For one thing, there’s no set rule or widely shared standard for how long a school should monitor a student in crisis. And state and local laws vary about sharing information when students move between schools and districts, as was the case in Georgia.
In Florida, state legislators made it easier for schools and law enforcement to share information about students in crisis following the 2018 shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school, Brown said.
“I have a student that comes from, let’s say Nebraska, and there was documentation that he had suicidal thoughts or she had threatening thoughts, if that student stepped into my school, I need to have the capability to see that and continue to provide those supports for that student,” Brown said.
Administrators must also find a balance between supporting students in crisis, preventing threats, and respecting privacy, she said.
“We don’t ever want to share anything that would be hurtful to a student, but we want to make sure that we are protecting other students on our campus,” Brown said. “It’s a delicate balance.”
Andy Fetchik, the former principal of Chardon High School in Chardon, Ohio, the site of a 2012 school shooting, said it’s critical to encourage students to speak up when they recognize concerning behavior.
“I think that message has gotten better,” he said.
Experts and school leaders agree that schools should not be deterred from the work of helping students in crisis. While tragedies make headlines, the countless averted attacks and students who’ve benefited from intervention are impossible to measure, Moore said.
“A lot of schools need help identifying what all of the intervention options are and what they can put in place to make sure a student is not only safe but also on a better path,” she said.
