6 Students Shot in Georgia; Boy, 15, Surrenders

A 15-year-old boy opened fire at his suburban high school Thursday morning, wounding six fellow students, then tearfully cried, “I’m so scared,” before surrendering the gun and falling into the assistant principal’s arms, police and witnesses said.

About 8 a.m. EDT, students heard shots fired inside Heritage High School, 25 miles east of Atlanta. Many simply thought a senior prank was underway, since Thursday was the last day of school for seniors, and just the day before, someone had released 2,000 crickets in the halls.

Then reality dawned. It was yet another random school shooting in a peaceful-looking American suburb, yet another attack, apparently, by a “quiet” teenager suffering the pangs of social rejection.

And it stirred painful memories and emotions nationwide, coming exactly one month after the worst high school shooting in U.S. history, at Littleton, Colo.’s, Columbine High School, in which 15 were killed and two dozen injured.

The Colorado shootings had already spawned a spate of copycat bomb scares and conspiracy threats in recent weeks, closing schools and fraying parents’ nerves from Port Huron, Mich., to Allen, Texas. And two Anaheim eighth-graders were arrested Thursday after police said they found a terrifying cache of weapons and bomb-making materials at one boy’s house.

But Thursday’s shooting here was no mere scare, no false alarm.

Police said the shooter brought two guns to school: a .22-caliber rifle and an unidentified handgun. He began the attack with the rifle, shooting wildly as he ran. Some witnesses said the boy seemed to be aiming low, trying to shoot students below the waist.

Boy Never Posed Discipline Problem

School officials said the boy, a sophomore, had never posed a discipline problem and didn’t seem to be the kind of student capable of such violence. He and his 13-year-old sister lived with their mother and stepfather on a street of $275,000 houses. The family moved here two years ago from North Carolina.

But classmates said the boy had been despondent about a breakup with his girlfriend, and his grades had begun to spiral.

After questioning the boy and his parents, police held him at a juvenile detention center. Because of his age, the boy’s name wasn’t released, but the local district attorney said he plans to prosecute the boy as an adult.

Stephanie Morris, 15, was just walking into the school’s common area when the shooting started.

“People started screaming, ‘He’s got a gun!’ ” she said. “Other kids were saying, ‘It’s just a prank.’ ”

Then she saw a friend shot in the foot.

“There was blood all over the place,” she said. “The teachers told us to go to home room. When I got to my home room, Stephanie Laster was in there. She was crying. The teacher checked her and [the teacher] had blood on her hand. The teacher said, ‘You’re going to be OK.’ The teacher was hugging her. Stephanie said, ‘My stomach is hurting.’ ”

Laster underwent surgery Thursday afternoon to remove a bullet lodged in her abdomen. Four of the wounded students were hospitalized overnight, including Laster, but none of the injuries was thought to be serious.

Sophomore Nathaniel Deeter, 15, said he talked to the shooter Wednesday.

“He said, ‘I have no reason to live anymore,’ ” Deeter said. “And I told him he was crazy. I thought he was just feeling sorry for himself because a lot of kids feel like that.”

Deeter said he also spoke with the boy moments before the shooting. The boy gave no indication of what was to come, and Deeter couldn’t see any weapons under his baggy clothes.

Morris said her friend Cara Ward was the boy’s ex-girlfriend. She said Ward was crying just after the attack, saying, “It was my boyfriend! It was my boyfriend who was shooting at everybody!”

“It’s OK,” a teacher told her. “It’s not your fault. You can’t know somebody is going to do something like that.”

“She kept saying, ‘It was him; it was him,’ ” Morris recalled. “I just hugged her and told her it wasn’t her fault. I saw them walking down the hall last week holding hands. She told me he was nice and quiet.”

Sophomore Chris Dunn once saw a small arsenal at the boy’s house.

“He had lots of guns,” Dunn said. “They were his parents’.”

But Dunn never heard the boy express a desire to shoot anyone.

“He showed them to me and my brother one time,” said 15-year-old Brad Morgan. “I don’t know much about guns, but I think they were, like, hunting guns.”

After several minutes of panic and gunfire, witnesses said, the boy dropped the rifle and walked outside. He then produced a pistol and aimed it at senior Joe Watts.

“He stood there with the gun,” Watts said, “then he dropped to his knees and put it in his mouth like he was going to shoot himself, and he started waving his hands around and pulling the back of his hair.”

An assistant principal, Cecil Brinkley, approached the boy. He asked for the gun, and the boy tearfully handed it over.

“And when [the assistant principal] got the gun from him,” Watts said, “he just quickly put his arm around him and held him and the boy started crying and said, ‘Oh, my God. I’m so scared, I’m so scared.’ ”

Graduation to Take Place as Planned

After the shootings, students collected on the school’s track, hugging and consoling each other, then boarded school buses for home. Though today’s classes were canceled, school officials vowed that graduation would take place May 28, as planned.

Like Columbine, Heritage is a highly regarded suburban school. U.S. News & World Report recently ranked it as one of the finest high schools in the nation.

Not long ago, Heritage officials wrote to the parents of the school’s 1,300 students, reassuring them that another Columbine wasn’t likely to happen here.

Students said they knew better. “Every day since then I’ve been thinking about whether it could happen here,” said Chris Scroggs, 15. “Last night I was thinking that this might be the day.”

Well before Columbine, Heritage officials had taken extra security measures. They installed hallway cameras and posted an armed sheriff’s deputy at the school door.

It wasn’t clear where the deputy was during Thursday’s shooting.

Stanley reported from Georgia and Moehringer from Los Angeles.