Georgia school shooting: Police had received prior warnings about suspect

The sheriff’s office alerted local schools to continue monitoring the teen, but there was no probable cause for his arrest or further action, the FBI said.

Hosey said the state Division of Family and Children Services had also had prior contact with the teen and will investigate whether that has any connection to the shooting. Local media reported that police on Wednesday searched the teen’s family home in Bethlehem, Georgia, east of the high school.

“All the students who had to watch their teachers and classmates die, who had to limp out of school, who looked traumatized,” Sayarath said, “that is the consequence of not taking control.”

Authorities were still investigating how the teenager obtained the gun used in the shooting and brought it to the school with about 1,900 students in Barrow County, a rapidly suburbanizing area on the edge of the ever-expanding Atlanta metropolitan area.

It is the latest in a series of school shootings in the United States in recent years, including deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have sparked heated debates about gun control and angered parents whose children grow up accustomed to active-shooter drills in the classroom, but they have done little to change the nation’s gun laws.

As of Wednesday, there had been 29 mass killings in the United States so far this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in collaboration with Northeastern University. At least 127 people have died in such killings, which are defined as incidents in which four or more people are killed within a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.

On Wednesday afternoon, hundreds of people gathered at Jug Tavern Park in downtown Winder for a vigil. Volunteers handed out candles, water, pizza and tissues. Some knelt as a Methodist minister led the crowd in prayer after a Barrow County commissioner read a Jewish prayer for mourning.

Christopher Vasquez, 15, said he attended the vigil because he needed to feel grounded and be in a safe place.

He was practicing with the band when the lockdown order was issued. He said it looked like a normal drill as students lined up to hide in the band closet.

“When we heard banging on the door and the SWAT team came to get us out, I knew it was serious,” she said. “I started shaking and crying.”

She finally calmed down when she arrived at the football stadium. “I was just praying that all my loved ones were safe,” she said.

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Associated Press writers Sharon Johnson, Mike Stewart and Erik Verduzco in Winder; Beatrice Dupuy in New York; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Charlotte Kramon, Kate Brumback and Jeff Martin in Atlanta; and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.