It was on Wednesday morning, local time, that the police and rescue services were alerted about the school shooting at Apalachee High School, in a small town outside Atlanta in Georgia. Two teachers and two students were killed, and nine people were injured.
A 14-year-old boy who was a student at the school was arrested just minutes after the deed, and was later charged with murder. No motive has yet been made public.
Connected to the son
The boy's father is now being charged, among other things, with multiple counts of manslaughter and homicide, since the father was aware that his son had a weapon.
The charges against him are directly linked to his son's actions, and that he allowed his son to possess a weapon, says Chris Hosey, head of the police authority in Georgia.
According to the arrest warrant obtained by the news agency AP, the boy used a semi-automatic rifle in the fatal shooting.
The latest case
Last year, the boy was already questioned by the police about a threatening message on social media, where the writer had threatened a school shooting. But the boy denied then that it was he who was behind the threat – and conflicting evidence meant that the police could not make an arrest, according to a report from the sheriff's office in nearby Jackson County.
We did everything we could with the information we had at the time, says Janis Mangum, sheriff in Jackson County.
The case in Georgia is the latest where parents have been held responsible for their children's actions in school shootings in the USA. In April, a parental couple in the state of Michigan – whose son killed four students in 2021 – was sentenced to at least 10 years in prison, partly for not securing a firearm they had at home and partly for acting indifferently to signs that their son's mental health was deteriorating.
