When an investigator from the Jackson County, Ga., sheriff’s office, interviewed a 13-year-old and his father about a possible online threat to “shoot up a middle school,” the teen denied responsibility. I have to take you at your word, said investigator Dan Miller, “and I hope you’re being honest with me.”
Nearly 16 months later, Colt Gray, now 14, killed four people and injured nine others at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., the deadliest school shooting in the state’s history.
Could law enforcement have done more to prevent it?
Most mass shooters display warning signs before becoming violent. Officials often get tips, calls or reports about concerning behavior, sometimes long before someone picks up a weapon, reports the New York Times.
Under traditional police training, officers are limited in what they can do. If a crime has not been committed or a subject does not meet the criteria to be sent for an involuntary mental health evaluation, the case may ben closed.
“It’s easy in hindsight to say, ‘Well, they should have done more,’” said UCLA law Prof. Adam Winkler, a gun policy expert. “But how many times do police get these leads that people are saying things online that are intercepted as threats that don’t lead to that kind of violence?”
“Law enforcement has to change its mind-set,” said Sheriff Bob Gualtieri of Pinellas County, Fla., who for six years has led a state commission investigating school violence after a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
The FBI failed to investigate thoroughly two tips before the 2018 Parkland shooting, including one from a relative who said she feared that the gunman “was going to slip into a school and start shooting the place up.” The Justice Department agreed to pay the shooting victims’ families a settlement of about $130 million.