The mother of the Georgia shooting suspect called the school 30 minutes warning of an "extreme emergency" before he allegedly opened fire there, his aunt has claimed.
Colt Gray, 14, is accused of shooting dead two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder, near Atlanta, on Wednesday.
Another teacher and a further eight students were injured but are expected to make a full recovery, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Annie Brown, the teenager's aunt, has said her sister called the school counsellor half an hour before gunfire broke out.
She told the Washington Post the boy's mother warned of an "extreme emergency" involving her son and that they needed to find him "immediately".
Phone records shared with the newspaper, and later confirmed by the Associated Press, show a 10-minute call was made from the family's shared phone plan to the school at that time.
It should be a standard protocol that if a parent is calling a school with an extreme emergency that involves a threat of a mass shooting, the police show up at the scene and begin securing it & hardening it from attack like they were called to an actual shooting.
Whether the school should be evacuated at this point is unclear to me because I am not a security effort. Perhaps it would actually create greater ease of targeting in the event of a shooting and be wrong. Perhaps the best move is to lockdown the school and post police at each entry point in addition to forming a perimeter far outside the school... IDK!
... But you would think an administrator would immediately contact the police and without any standard protocol, they would do something like this.
This is a massive failure.
Question is if she said "he took a weapon" "he is going to shoot up the school" or she said "there is an extreme emergency, go find him asap". Two different things. One is an actual immediate threat, the other might be "your dog died"
How is your dog died and emergency?
Better example would be something like a medical emergency. If I received a call saying I needed to find So-and-so because there's an extreme emergency I would assume it was a heart attack or something. Then again, I would probably ask clarifying questions so I know whether or not to call an ambulance.