Four dead at high school Father of 14-year-old shooter arrested and charged

Four people are dead after the latest school massacre at a school in the USA. Investigators believe that the suspect's father may be partly to blame. What is explosive is that his son was already targeted by investigators last year.

Following the rampage at a high school in the US state of Georgia, the father of the 14-year-old suspect has been arrested. He is accused of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, among other things, because he allowed his son to own a gun, the authorities announced. It is the latest example of a case in which parents in the USA are held responsible for the actions of their children. In April, the parents of a school rampage shooter were sentenced to long prison terms for the first time in Michigan.

In the Georgia case, the 54-year-old father of suspect Colt G. was charged on Thursday with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, as Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at a press conference. The charges are directly related to his son's actions and the fact that he was allowed to own a gun.

Authorities are charging Colt G., 14, with multiple counts of murder under adult law in connection with Wednesday's rampage at Apalachee High School. In arrest warrants obtained by the AP, he is charged with using a semi-automatic assault rifle to kill two students and two teachers and injure nine other people in the crime.

"Pure evil"14-year-old shoots four people at high school - nine injured

Suspect already targeted by the authorities last year

The suspect had already been targeted by the authorities before. When questioned about a social media post last year, he denied threatening to carry out a massacre at a school, according to a report from the sheriff's office in neighboring Jackson County that became public on Thursday.

Conflicting evidence regarding the origin of the post prevented an arrest from being made, according to the report. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the report from May 2023 and found nothing that would have warranted prosecution of the suspect at that time. There was no omission, Mangum told the AP news agency. "We did everything we could do with what we had at the time."

When a Jackson County investigator questioned G. last year, his father said the boy had suffered from his parents' separation and was often teased at school. The teen regularly used guns and went hunting with his father, who photographed him with the blood of a deer on his cheeks. "He knows how dangerous guns are and what they can do, and how to use them and how not to use them," the boy's father said at the time, according to a transcript of the authorities' report.

Threats on Discord

The interrogation of the teenager was preceded by a tip from the FBI that the then 13-year-old may have threatened to carry out a school massacre the following day. The threat was posted on Discord, a platform popular with gamers, according to the sheriff's office report. There had been evidence of a connection to a Discord user account linked to an email address belonging to G.. However, the boy had said that he would never say such a thing, not even in jest.

There was no arrest because of "inconsistent information" about the Discord account. The profile information was partly written in Russian and digital traces indicated that the user account was accessed from various cities in Georgia, as well as from Buffalo in the state of New York.

There were no classes at the affected school on Thursday. However, some people came to lay flowers on a flagpole.

dpa