As a 14-year-old Georgia boy allegedly fired his assault-style rifle at classmates Wednesday morning, teachers and two well-trained resource officers at Apalachee High School followed protocol, locking down classrooms and locating the shooter.

Their actions were hailed as heroic and likely lifesaving. But emerging details about the boy’s tragic path to opening fire underscore how growing efforts in U.S. schools to locate and defuse threats often struggle. As a result, four people died and nine others were wounded earlier this week in the worst school shooting in Georgia history.

Colt Gray appeared in court Friday, facing the prospect of being tried as an adult on four murder charges. As his story emerges, it’s a stark portrait of reputed domestic abuse, failed efforts of authority figures, inconsistent weapons laws, and a U.S. society forced to balance widespread alienation with privacy and weapons rights. Colt’s father, Colin Gray, was in court Friday on charges of cruelty to children and second-degree murder for allegedly gifting his son the AR-15-style rifle used in the shooting as a Christmas present last year.

And while experts say national school-safety responses may have stopped scores of potential shootings, the tragedy in Winder, a small city of just under 30,000 people outside Atlanta, underscores how profound the problems are that remain. 

School safety is both reactive and preventive

The shooting shows “how we as a society are trying to deal with this problem in terms of reactive measures versus preventive measures,” says Mark Follman, author of “Trigger Points: Inside the Mission To Stop Mass Shootings in America.” 

Despite resources already poured into this unfathomable American crisis, “It points right back to the question, What could have been done to keep this from happening in the first place?”

Brynn Anderson/Reuters

Colin Gray, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, sits in the Barrow County Courthouse on the day of their first court appearances, in Winder, Georgia, Sept. 6, 2024.

The number of school-related threats of violence had dropped to 1,905 during the 2023-2024 academic year, down from a prepandemic high of 3,434, according to research by the Educator’s School Safety Network.

But violent incidents overall continued an upward climb. The network counted 378 violent incidents last year, up from 253 in the 2022-2023 school year.

About half of U.S. schools had armed security staff in the 2020 school year, almost twice the number a decade earlier. Apalachee High School staff members had received panic buttons – fobs worn around their necks that could be pressed to alert local authorities to emergencies at the school –  a week before the shooting. On Wednesday, those alarms were activated, putting the school on lockdown and alerting police. 

Georgia doesn’t require public schools to have such alarms, but six states, including Florida, do. Apalachee High’s building also had automatic locking doors, in case of an emergency. Every school in Georgia is required to have a violence prevention plan in place.

Half of all states now require threat assessment teams, and two-thirds of America’s schools now have such teams in place, according to the Pew Research Center.

Is there an effective defense?

But those teams are not only new and largely inexperienced; they also face jurisdictional and privacy issues.

Making prevention trickier, Georgia is one of 29 states without a red flag law, meaning that police there can’t seize weapons from those in mental distress or who may pose danger.

SOURCE:

Education Week, "School Shootings This Year: How Many and Where" (Jan. 4, 2024), retrieved Sept. 6, 2024; Everytown for Gun Safety

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“The key with threat assessment is you tie it in with physical security, partnerships with law enforcement, coordinating not only physical safety but investigating risks and threats and how you look at response,” says Mario Scalora, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln psychologist who studies targeted violence. “We do this because we all have people we care about in those buildings.”

Strong parental and privacy rights in the United States can also make determining how real or big a threat is more difficult.

Those challenges came into sharp focus this week in Winder, the seat of Barrow County, a fast-growing region nestled between Atlanta and the college town of Athens.

Last year, the FBI received warnings from as far away as Australia about threats made on Discord and linked to Colt’s account.

But two local sheriff’s deputies couldn’t confirm at the time that it was Colt who had made the statements. It is not clear whether information about those threats was relayed when he moved to his new school in August.

Eric Gay/AP/File

Students are checked as they pass through a metal defector as they arrive at Freedom Elementary School, Aug. 23, 2023, in San Antonio. A Texas law requiring armed officers on every campus was one of Republican lawmakers' biggest acts following the 2022 Uvalde school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers.

Mr. Follman says the events highlight a challenge for threat assessment: “What did the people around him do – and not do – with the information they had?”

Neighbors and family members reported family problems, including drug abuse, neglect, and violence. One neighbor said children, including Colt, were locked out of a house in freezing weather, screaming to be let in.

Colt’s aunt, Annie Brown, told The Washington Post that the boy “had been begging for help from everybody around him.”

None ultimately came. Those who died in this week’s shooting were students Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, and teachers Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie. The eight students and a teacher who were hurt are expected to recover, authorities say.

Making time, taking responsibility

“What you have to understand is that we are facing a force,” says Aaron Stark, a mental health advocate in Denver. 

He knows. He has been there.

While homeless in 1996, he plotted a mass shooting at a school before a friend offered an alienated, angry, and suicidal Mr. Stark a shower and time to hang out and talk together. The simple act, coupled with his difficulty in procuring a weapon in Colorado, a state with strong gun control laws, defused the plan.

Mr. Stark says his story illuminates how love and responsibility are the chief protagonists against darker impulses of hatred and hurt. When he planned his shooting, his primary goal wasn’t to harm others, he says, but to show his parents “what a monster they had created.”

Mr. Stark says Americans are growing more comfortable talking about mental health, which makes him hopeful.

But getting adults to take responsibility for children in their care continues to be a problem. 

Indeed, if school threat protocols aren’t implemented with trust and goodwill – and understood by all staff members – they won’t work, says Amy Klinger, co-founder of the Educator’s School Safety Network.

Those concerns are likely not lost on those who may have been able to help Colt before he lashed out. 

“For those of us [who work in threat assessment], we feel the pain of another unnecessary loss,” says Professor Scalora, in Lincoln. “We also feel the pain for the people involved, because we understand the costs and implications of this work.”

Guatemalan Public Prosecutor's Office

Rigoberto Ramón Miranda-Orozco, alleged leader of "The Orozco" human trafficking gang, was arrested and brought before the Guatemalan courts in late August 2024. He is one of seven men charged in relation to the 2022 tragedy in San Antonio, Texas, when 53 migrants suffocated in an abandoned tractor trailer.

More than two years since the deadliest human smuggling event in recent U.S. history, fresh arrests in Guatemala signal a new era of cross-border cooperation that experts say is key to stemming smuggling at a time of record-high migration.

Seven men were detained by the Guatemalan government late last month and charged with trafficking in the 2022 deaths of 53 migrants who perished in a tractor trailer abandoned in the sweltering Texas heat by a network paid to safely – and illegally – bring them into the United States.

U.S. authorities have put in an extradition request for one of the men. He is believed to be the mastermind of the operation, which killed several children, a pregnant woman, and dozens of other Guatemalan, Honduran, Mexican, and Salvadoran immigrants seeking safety and opportunity in the U.S.

As migration grows – and immigration laws become more restrictive – the trafficking of migrants desperate to reach the U.S. has flourished. Human smugglers often oversell their “services,” offering anything from safe passage to supposedly processing asylum requests, targeting a vulnerable and desperate population at a high cost. Although the August arrests in Guatemala may seem like a drop in the bucket at a time when, globally, human migration is at a historic high, observers say it’s a step in the right direction. The twelve people, including two U.S. citizens, now facing charges for the tragic end of these migrants involve those at all levels of planning, from mapping out the route to recruiting “clients,” to driving the big rig that was eventually abandoned.

Jody García

Francisco Pellizzari, director of Casa del Migrante, sits in a shelter in Guatemala City, Aug. 30, 2024. Migration and human smuggling are "global" challenges, but they "can be alleviated through the coordination of governments," he says.

If there isn’t multinational collaboration, targeting both root causes of migration and the people profiting from it, these tragedies won’t stop, says Francisco Pellizzari, director of Casa del Migrante Scalabrini, a Catholic organization that runs migrant shelters in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico. “It is a global phenomenon, but it can be alleviated through the coordination of governments,” he says. “It has to be a response from various operators, actors, governments, and civil society.”

“A collaborative effort”

Deisy Fermina López Ramírez first left home when she was 15 years old, and, like many migrants, first looked for answers to her family’s poverty inside her home country. She moved 155 miles away to Guatemala City, where she held different odd jobs, earning roughly $150 per month. But it wasn’t enough to put food on the table and support her family, says her father, Oslidio López, an Indigenous farmer in a lush, mountainous village in northwestern Guatemala.

When Ms. López was 23 years old, she contacted a group of human traffickers, referred to locally as “coyotes” or “polleros,” whom she paid for safe passage from Comitancillo, San Marcos to the U.S. with the deeds to the land where her family lives. Her parents also took out a loan to help pay the fee. Her father declined to say if they are still paying interest on the loan.

Weeks after her departure for the U.S., her family’s world shattered with the news that Ms. López was one of the 53 people who were left to perish in a sealed big rig, without access to water or fresh air, in the brutal Texas heat.

“One feels bitterness and pain, but I cannot do anything, as much as I would like to,” says Mr. López, who adds that he doesn’t understand the legal system here, and that the arrests have done little to dull the pain of losing his daughter.

Guatemala’s Public Ministry reports that between 2022 and 2024, some 230 people accused of trafficking migrants were arrested here. But, without international cooperation, arrests like these may not result in much, especially in a country where collaborations between criminal groups and local police are common place, says Carlos Eduardo Woltke Martínez, deputy director of the Guatemalan Migration Institute (IGM).

Jody García

Carlos Eduardo Woltke Martínez, deputy director of the Guatemalan Migration Institute in Guatemala City, Sept. 4, 2024. People who work with smugglers to reach the U.S. "feel like they are beneficiaries of a service. But they are victims of a crime," he says.

On Aug. 21, Guatemalan officials announced the arrests of seven people accused of helping smuggle some of the migrants who died alongside Ms. López. That included Rigoberto Román Mirando-Orozco, the alleged ringleader. The next day, U.S. authorities announced Mr. Orozco’s indictment and extradition request. 

“This is a collaborative effort between the Guatemalan police and [the U.S. Department of] Homeland Security, in addition to other national agencies, to dismantle the structures of human trafficking,” Guatemala’s interior minister told the Associated Press last month.

The shifting “how” of migration

The dynamics of migration have changed dramatically over the past two decades, and that includes how – and with whose guidance – people are migrating, says Cindy Espina, a journalist and investigator of migration based in Mexico City.

“It is no longer the relatives or local leaders, as it was in the 1990s, who guide migrants” north, she says. “Now there are trafficking networks across Mexico that can charge almost $20,000 per trip” to the U.S.

As organized crime and drug trafficking have grown in the region, so too have restrictive immigration policies. Following Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. southern border became more militarized, halting what for generations were circular patterns of migration, with laborers coming to the U.S. seasonally and then returning home. Later came pandemic-era policies that essentially shuttered the U.S. border to outsiders without visas, creating a buildup of desperation among migrants. Most recently, strict asylum restrictions have changed border dynamics once again.

Instead of single, working-age men, today migrant shelters are overwhelmed by previously atypical migrant profiles, like families, unaccompanied minors, and the elderly.

Mr. Pellizzari, from Casa del Migrante, says that in 2023 the organization served around 32,000 people at the shelter in Guatemala City alone. That’s almost double their 2018 record, when a caravan of Honduran migrants passed through the shelter and they assisted roughly 18,000 people.

As organized criminal groups expanded their business models beyond drug trafficking to include kidnapping, extortion, and human smuggling, migratory routes became infiltrated by predators. Human smugglers now commonly advertise their services through local radio stations and social media networks, such as TikTok, says Mr. Woltke.

“People feel like they are beneficiaries of a service,” says Mr. Woltke. “But they are victims of a crime.”

And it’s not just high fees, but increasingly people might pay with deeds to their land, like the López family, or take out sky-high-interest loans from unauthorized agents. This generates long-term costs – and more pressure to arrive in the U.S. one way or another to start earning money – that can create a situation that “worsens the poverty of people who sought to migrate to escape from it,” he says.

According to estimates by the IGM, 90% of migrants who returned to Guatemala in the past five years barely managed to cross more than 60 miles into the U.S. before being deported back to unsustainable debt.

Human smugglers “will always look for a way to make a profit through the people,” says Mr. Woltke. “Their goal is not the safety or the integrity of migrants.”

Grace Tumaini’s round face twists with the pain of an early contraction. Her brow furrows and her eyes close. She is preparing to give birth to her first child in a small maternity ward in a displacement camp 40 miles from her home.

On the hot July morning when Ms. Tumaini goes into labor, eight women occupy the ward’s five beds, their legs twisted with those of strangers in the tight space. 

As the women cry out for their own mothers, their sobs mingle with the mewling of newborns, who will spend the first days of their lives in tents built precariously atop rocks and gravel. Their families are among the nearly 2 million people who have fled surging violence in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo over the past two years. 

Since the beginning of 2024, some 1,200 babies have been born in this room, a testament to both the trauma of war and how, in spite of it, life carries stubbornly on. 

Far from home 

As Ms. Tumaini breathes through her contraction, midwife Daddy Ngeve walks down the row of beds, stepping carefully on a floor still slick with turpentine from cleaning. She bends over each woman in turn to lay her reassuring hand on a sweaty shoulder or to whisper encouragement. 

Sophie Neiman

Grace Tumaini prepares to give birth to her first child in a crowded maternity ward in Goma, Congo, July 5, 2024.

This maternity ward is one part of a small Médecins Sans Frontières-supported clinic in Goma, Congo. Uniformed doctors dart in and out of brick-walled rooms, and tents have been set up in the courtyard to deal with triage. In the distance, the dilapidated structures under which displaced people have sheltered are just visible. 

Over the last 13 years, Ms. Ngeve has delivered thousands of babies, each born into one of successive waves of conflict in eastern Congo. 

Over that time, the midwife has learned the languages of the different parts of the country, ripped apart by war, so that she can offer her patients words of comfort from the homes they left behind. “Push. Breathe,” she tells them. “It will be all right.” 

The women now in the ward fled fighting between the Congolese army and rebels from the March 23 Movement, better known as M23. Backed by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, the group was formed by dissatisfied Congolese soldiers in 2012 and stepped up its military activity in early 2022. 

M23 claims to protect Congo’s ethnic Tutsi population, but has unleashed its violence indiscriminately on farming villages, forcing civilians to flee their homes.    

Ms. Tumaini arrived in Goma in late October 2023, taking refuge in one of the mushrooming camps on the city’s outskirts. She and her husband joined the tens of thousands of people who are currently living on any unoccupied land they can find in North Kivu’s lakeside capital, sheltering under whatever they can scrounge together to keep the wind and sun off their backs. 

Ms. Tumaini knew that for a healthy pregnancy, she needed to gain weight, but she could not farm in the displacement camp, and she feared being raped by armed men if she ventured into the surrounding fields to look for something to eat. 

Now, waiting her turn to give birth, she worries she has already fallen short as a mother. 

“When you are pregnant, you have to feed the baby, and I couldn’t feed two people,” she says nervously. 

Suddenly, Ms. Tumaini’s bedmate cries out. Her baby is coming. 

Ms. Tumaini moves to the adjacent bed, watching in numb anticipation from a plastic-covered mattress as the woman pushes the baby into Ms. Ngeve’s waiting arms. As the infant wails, the mother flashes an exhausted thumbs-up. Ms. Tumaini and the others clap. 

Sophie Neiman

Midwife Daddy Ngeve has delivered thousands of babies over her 13 years of work, all born into cycles of war and violence in eastern Congo. July 5, 2024.

Helping women 

Ms. Ngeve lives for these moments. Helping bring life into the world, she says, feels akin to being a “second God on Earth.” 

She first became interested in medicine as a young girl, marveling at the doctors and nurses in bright white coats whom her parents called to treat her when she was sick. 

“I feel good when I can help women like me who are facing difficulties,” she says in a tone both warm and matter-of-fact. “I am happy to practice what I love.” 

When Ms. Ngeve is not tending to pregnant women, she manages a clinic caring for survivors of sexual violence and she gives lessons in family planning and contraception to displaced men and women alike. 

Sometimes, after the mothers in the maternity ward take their children back to their plastic tents, Ms. Ngeve does not see them again. But others return to her proudly, showing off the growing children she helped to deliver. 

Always, she has the same hope for them. 

“I want them to grow up in health and know something other than war,” Ms. Ngeve says. “I hope they will not know the same misery that their parents experienced.” 

Sophie Neiman

Displaced women parade back from a maternity ward to their camps on the outskirts of Goma, to celebrate the births of their children, July 9, 2024.

Small celebrations 

Ms. Ngeve’s aspirations are shared by the young women she aids. They find ways to celebrate their new babies however they can, often parading from the maternity ward back to their tents, singing and drumming on yellow plastic jerricans as they go.  

A Monitor reporter met Ms. Tumaini again two days after she’d given birth to a baby boy named Gabriel. 

In a tent made of dusty tarpaulin and fragile bits of wood, she held him tightly on her lap, cooing to a small newborn hidden in a bundle of woolen blankets. 

Two aunts and the boy’s father looked on proudly. They’d gathered as many potatoes and bags of dried beans as they could and bought some soda, throwing a small party to trumpet Gabriel’s arrival. Even without much food to eat, they shared whatever they could with friends and neighbors.

Someday, Ms. Tumaini prays, she will return to her village, to the farm where she once grew cassava and maize in abundance. 

Gabriel will eat as much as he wants, every day, and she will make enough money to pay for him to have a good education.

“He could become a nurse or a doctor,” she says, “and provide help to the population as people here do for us.” 

Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. 

A couple of Saturdays ago, I found myself catching a night football game starring my beloved Florida A&M Rattlers. (Yes, I’m an alum.) Unexpectedly, a familiar face popped up on-screen: singer and actor Tyrese Gibson, a mainstay of the “Fast & Furious” franchise.

“What is he doing here?” I asked myself. The jumbotron quickly answered. Mr. Gibson was on hand to promote his latest film, “1992.” So I went to see it.

The film is a lot of things. It’s the legendary Ray Liotta’s last movie. It’s a crime-suspense thriller about a heist gone wrong. It’s an examination of fathers and sons, juxtaposing Mr. Gibson’s and Mr. Liotta’s roles as imperfect parents to adolescent and adult males. But it is also intentional about the actual event that defines the film: On April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of assault in the brutal beating of Rodney King, a Black man. Violence followed.

That intrigued me from the outset. The events around the King verdict made 1992 an important year for the “language of the unheard.” It brought attention to the plight of those too often overlooked or ignored. How would the film address those elements of history? 

1992 and 2020

At first, my reaction was one of association. The film “1992,” of course, reminded me of 2020. It reminded me of the furor over George Floyd’s murder and how, for a moment, that inspired a nation to do better. Mr. Floyd’s story, along with those of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, challenged how the justice system deals with Black people and held it to account.  

The fervor of those days is visible in the film’s depiction of outrage, confusion, and despair in a Black community wrestling with such injustice. 

But in that way, the movie also is a reminder of how that national urgency has abated. It is not building off a wave of outrage. It seeks to rekindle one – or at least to reawaken the discussion.

Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Director Ariel Vromen (left) and cast member Tyrese Gibson attend a premiere of the film ‘’1992’’ in Los Angeles, Aug. 27, 2024.

In its high points, it even strikes a contemplative tone. In one poignant scene, Mr. Gibson’s character and his son offer insight into what it means for people to riot and cause damage in their own communities. Is an antiestablishment, “fight the power” sentiment essential? Or does it only make rebuilding harder in a community already struggling with limited resources and fractured trust?

When the historian in me watches “1992,” he sees a pattern.

Just as Mr. Floyd’s murder happened close to 30 years after the King beating and verdict, the King unrest happened three decades after the similar events in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. In mid-August 1965, an argument between a Black motorist, Marquette Frye, and a white police officer escalated into nearly a week of rioting. The incident inspired leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, such as Martin Luther King Jr., to widen their gaze beyond the South.

But what happened in Watts, and then after the King verdict, and then again after the murder of Mr. Floyd? Was there unrest, including violence and rioting? Yes. But also rebellion.

Rioting and community angst is never unprovoked. Elizabeth Hinton’s beautiful book “America on Fire” looks at the untold history of police violence and Black rebellion since the 1960s, as the subtitle puts it. It states, “The history of Black rebellion across regions and decades demonstrates a fundamental reality: police violence precipitates community violence.”

Gibson’s standout performance

In “1992,” this spirit is best embodied in Mr. Gibson, who often redeems the film from its inconsistencies. In other moments, for example, Black characters are treated like fodder for a middling plot and discarded when that script falls apart.

Mr. Gibson’s performance is an extension of the press appearances he made ahead of the film. His intent to promote the stories of Black people came off as refreshingly honest. “Black men cry,” he offered during one appearance, where he talked about grief, divorce, and his mother’s passing.

I can still remember the 1994 ad in which Mr. Gibson got his start, singing the praises of Coca-Cola on a city bus. Here, he shows how much has changed, tapping into the angst of a historic time period and delivering one of his most important performances on-screen. As an actor, he has evolved, grown, matured.

I would like to think this country is capable of a similar transformation. To claim it, we must acknowledge that the events of 1992 are but part of a pattern – a greater and sadder tale. At the end of the film, a refrain from the late Donny Hathaway’s “Little Ghetto Boy” plays over the closing credits and resonates: “Everything has got to get better.”

AP

The Rolling Stones's Mick Jagger sings with Cui Jian, China's best known rocker, in Shanghai in 2006.

A new textbook for university students in China warns that rock ’n’ roll is a security threat, designed by the West to stir up young people for revolution. That news is a bit off-key to the tens of millions of Chinese who attend rock music festivals almost every weekend, enjoy a vibrant underground music scene in big cities, and tune in to TV competitions among rock bands.

One industrial city, Shijiazhuang, even dubbed itself the “hometown” of rock in the past year, while Wuhan enjoys being known as “Punk City.” In April, one fan of Chinese rock, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was in Beijing and bought the album “Black Dream” by rock star Dou Wei at a record store.

Rock certainly has roots in youthful rebellion. That’s why the first Elvis album from the 1950s was not released in China until 1977, or after the Cultural Revolution and death of Mao Tse-tung. The Rolling Stones did not play in China until 2006.

The first big Chinese rock star, Cui Jian, had a hit in the mid-1980s, “Nothing to My Name,” which was used during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Mr. Cui “introduced people not only to a new sound, but to a new idea: That there were alternatives out there; that you could be an individual, that maybe, just maybe, we didn’t have all the things we were supposed to have,” wrote Jonathan Campbell in his book, “Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll.”

But rock in the Middle Kingdom has evolved, adopting Chinese instruments and sounds while often being overshadowed by pop music, especially songs by megastar Taylor Swift. It has “become more diverse and decentralized,” wrote one big rock fan, Cai Yineng, an editor of the cultural news site Sixth Tone. The new rock music, while often censored by authorities, is bringing attention to issues like pollution and globalization, he states.

If rock sparks revolutions – and it clearly had an influence in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – it is only in the thought of the listener. Rock relies on a creative freedom and a curiosity that breaks mental boundaries.

“By retaining our ‘open-earedness,’ we can enjoy all the new features and sounds that China’s rock musicians are constantly throwing our way, and perhaps also keep our ears to the ground of Chinese society and popular sentiment at the same time. Let’s stay curious,” wrote Mr. Cai in August.

What most worries the Chinese Communist Party is that rock music may be the bearer of “universal values,” like the idea of individual freedom. Yet the party’s new college textbook is up against a very strong music scene in China, whether it be rock, reggae, or rap. That was clear in a social media posting by China’s table-tennis gold medal winner Fan Zhendong during the Paris Olympics. An avid “Swiftie,” he wrote, “Music is universal. Great musicians like Taylor Swift bring us healing power and confidence.”