As Gunfire Rang Out, Students and Teachers Huddled in Fear

The lockdown alert flashed on a screen in Stephen Kreyenbuhl’s classroom at Apalachee High School as the gunfire started.

Mr. Kreyenbuhl, a world history teacher, said he heard at least 10 shots on Wednesday morning, as the deadliest episode of school violence in Georgia history unfolded around the corner from his room.

Within minutes, four people — two students and two teachers — had been killed on the campus of Apalachee High School, in Winder, roughly 50 miles from downtown Atlanta. The authorities identified the shooter as a 14-year-old student at the school.

Laniel Arteta, a freshman, said he and other students huddled in the corner of their technology classroom, their hands over their heads, after the gunfire erupted. He heard screams, and the voice of his teacher urging the students to stay quiet. They waited like that, he said, for more than an hour.

When Laniel was finally shepherded out of the building with his classmates, he saw scads of police officers. He also saw loose shoes everywhere, but he did not know why, he said. Mr. Kreyenbuhl, 26, said he walked past a “pool of blood.”

Greg Mann, a parent at Apalachee High School, told 11 Alive, the NBC affiliate in Atlanta, that many students, who fled to the football field, had left their phones and keys inside the school. Mr. Mann said he was at the school helping to connect them with their families.

As parents scrambled to reunite with their children, traffic snarled around the school. Shelbey Diamond-Alexander, the chair of the Barrow County Democratic Party, said she was handing out bottles of water to some parents who left their cars to walk the final mile and a half to the school. “It’s a mess out here,” she said. “People are just trying to get their children. It’s devastating for our community.”

Laniel was able to find his father, Harvy Arteta, and at 4 p.m., about a mile from campus, the pair were by the side of a road choked with cars. Helicopters whirred above them. Laniel and his father seemed in shock.

Speaking in Spanish, Laniel said that about two years ago he came to the United States from Nicaragua, a country that has experienced bouts of intense political violence. But Laniel was aware that here, in the United States, there was a particular kind of problem to fear in school.

Now, he said, it was going to be difficult to go back to class.

Mr. Arteta, 40, seemed just as scared to send his son to Apalachee High in the coming days. Because what was to stop it from happening again? “It’s really complicated, going back,” he said.