At candlelight vigils and in Sunday church services, at fund-raisers for funerals and in quiet moments at home, another city began wrestling with a grief that has been inflicted on numerous American communities before it, a profound sorrow swirled with anger and confusion caused by a deadly mass shooting.
And now, those emotions in Winder, Ga., were streaked with budding doubts there had been missed opportunities to intervene before a gunman killed two students and two teachers last week at Apalachee High School.
Some in the community — including family members of victims, and students and parents at the school — expressed increased skepticism on Sunday about whether indications that the 14-year-old suspect was a threat had been adequately heeded by the teenager’s family, school officials and law enforcement officials.
The concern grew after reports emerged of the suspect’s mother calling the school roughly a half-hour before the authorities responded to the shooting, apparently to warn them.
“We believe it was preventable — 100 percent,” Lisette Angulo, the older sister of Christian Angulo, a 14-year-old boy who was killed, said of her and her family’s perspective in a message sent to The New York Times. “They knew of the situation beforehand,” she said, “and didn’t take proper action to prevent this tragedy from happening.”
Ms. Angulo praised the officers and emergency workers who responded to the shooting on Wednesday morning, namely the school resource officers to whom the suspect surrendered. They had acted “efficiently and appropriately,” she said.
But the looming questions about whether the suspect, a freshman at the school named Colt Gray, could have somehow been diverted before the attack have intensified after the boy’s aunt, Annie Brown, told reporters about the mother’s warning and that her nephew had begged in recent months for mental health help.
Local law enforcement officials had investigated but ultimately could not definitively link the suspect to threats of a school shooting posted online last year. The suspect’s father, Colin Gray, has been charged with murder and manslaughter for allowing his son access to the military-style rifle used in the attack, officials said.
A spokeswoman for the Barrow County School System declined on Sunday to comment on the mother’s call or the investigation more broadly and referred questions to the local district attorney prosecuting the case. That prosecutor, J. Bradley Smith, declined to comment on Sunday.
On Sunday, speaking through the cracked front door of her parents’ house in Fitzgerald, Ga., Marcee Gray did not discuss the phone call, which, her sister said, she made at 9:50 a.m. on Wednesday, some 30 minutes before the authorities received reports of a shooting at the school.
It remains unclear what led Ms. Gray to give that warning on that day. But relatives said the suspect had been deeply affected by turmoil in his life in recent years. His parents had separated, the family had been evicted from their home, and his mother had repeated encounters with law enforcement and had been ordered to stay away from drugs and alcohol and not have direct contact with her estranged husband. The boy had also been relentlessly bullied in middle school, his father told investigators looking into the online threat last year.
“I don’t have anything to say other than I’m very, very sorry to the parents,” Ms. Gray said. “I haven’t stopped crying since this happened on Wednesday. And if I, as a parent, if I could swap places with those children so that they could live, I would do it in a heartbeat. But I can’t.”
About 200 miles north in Winder, a city of some 19,000 people that had grown from a rural outpost to an exurb of Atlanta, people were searching fitfully for how to move forward.
The flagpole at Apalachee High School had become a hub for mourning, with flowers and notes of support. A group of bikers collectively revved their engines as a tribute. Blue and yellow bandannas — the school’s colors — were tied onto a road sign near the school.
“The solace that I have, and the peace that I have, is what I’m seeing in front of me,” Jud Smith, the Barrow County sheriff, said at a vigil on Friday where elected officials and community leaders spoke and “Amazing Grace” was sung. “I see community.”
Still, many braced for what would most likely be an excruciating road ahead — mourning those who were killed, tending to the physical and psychological wounds sustained by students and teachers at the school and trying to restore a sense of safety that has been shredded.
“I’ve been trying to distract myself because my mind doesn’t really want to process what happened,” Sarah Licona, a 17-year-old senior, said on Sunday, adding that the effort had been futile, as the trauma felt inescapable. “Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in that classroom scared for my life.”
What she could do, she said, was push herself to eat meals. Go to her job at McDonald’s to keep busy. Call friends. Talk to the people who cared about her.
“The more I let everything out,” she said, “the better I feel.”
But many were still taking stock of that day, revisiting what they saw and heard in an attempt to understand what had unfolded.
Lyela Sayarath, who started at Apalachee last year after several years of being home-schooled because she “just wanted to have the high school experience,” had algebra during second period with the suspect. The period runs from 9:45 a.m. to 11:08.
The school year had started a month earlier, and the suspect, a student who arrived after the semester had begun, missed class frequently, she said. That day, she had seen him shortly before class began, she recounted in an interview.
Then she put her head on her desk while she waited for class to begin. He was not there, Lyela, 16, said, when an administrator came to the room, looking for another student whose full name varied from the suspect’s by only a few letters. That student, who sat across from Ms. Sayarath, had gone to the bathroom, she said. The administrator took his backpack, and left.
When the other student came back, Lyela said, she asked him what was going on, and he told her the administrator had not been looking for him.
An adult had asked him, “‘You’re not Colt?’” she recalled him telling her.
A short time later, Lyela recalled, a voice on the intercom requested that the teacher check her email, which she did. Then the voice came over the intercom again — Lyela does not recall the reason — and she looked up and saw the suspect approaching the door from the outside.
“Oh, he’s here,’’ Lyela recalled the teacher saying.
The classroom door locked automatically. A student who moved to open the door stepped back, seeing that the suspect was carrying a gun, according to Lyela’s account.
A few seconds later, she said she saw — through the glass window in the door — as Mr. Gray turned and began to shoot down the hall, or into the classroom next to the algebra room.
The torment for students and teachers of living through an experience like that was evident as soon as Sara Schneider arrived on campus on Wednesday morning, shortly after the shooting, she said. Ms. Schneider, the founder of the Bowen Walker Foundation, a nonprofit serving grieving and bereaved children, said she immediately encountered “quite a few” students having panic attacks.
“You could see it on their faces,” Ms. Schneider said. “The pain and heartache is radiating from them.”
In the days since, students have opened up about their sorrow, their frustration, their anger — a “‘how dare you’ kind of anger” directed at the perpetrator, she said.
Ms. Schneider said that she was told on Wednesday by a teacher who was the suspect’s first-period teacher that the teacher had informed school counselors that morning that the teenager had been “acting weird.” (The teacher, when reached on Sunday, declined to comment.)
But as strong as the fury and frustration with the suspect were, what came first for many in and around Winder were the memories of the victims: Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and the teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 52.
Gabrielle Robinson Pickett, 15, said Mason’s absence would be felt every morning she did not see him standing on the corner where the school bus picked him up. “We grew up together,” she said, recalling their days on the elementary school playground. “It’s really hard.”
Tending to those who lost loved ones, caring for those physically and emotionally scarred by the attack, contemplating how the community can collectively find a way toward healing. All of that mattered more.
Gabrielle’s mother, Charmaine Pickett, started what she intended to be a small gathering for some of her neighbors for Mason. It quickly blossomed into something much larger. Pastors came to lead prayers. Restaurants brought pizza, wings, doughnuts, soft drinks. People lit candles and released balloons. Mason’s mother and sister came.
Everyone wore red. It was Mason’s favorite color.
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