The AR-style weapon used by alleged Apalachee High School shooter Cory Gray has been pictured lying in the corridor following the massacre as it emerged cops previously visited his home but didn’t seize any guns.
Gray, 14, is accused of fatally shooting four people, including two students, and injuring nine others during the bloodbath on Wednesday.
It has since emerged that the Georgia teen and his dad have been on the FBI’s radar for more than a year, but no weapons were ever removed from their home.
Investigators interviewed the father and son following ‘several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time’, including photographs of guns.
Officials said Gray, then aged 13, ‘denied making the threats online’ at the time and did not have unsupervised access.
The only action taken was to warn local schools to ‘continually monitor’ the troubled teen, with the FBI stating there was ‘no probable cause for arrest’.
Authorities say they are still looking into how the suspected gunman was able to bring a weapon into school.
At a Wednesday evening press conference, officials said he used a ‘AR platform-style weapon’ in the rampage, but are still unclear on who owned the gun or where he got it from.
‘We’re still trying to clarify a lot of the timeline from the time that he got here to school today until the incident,’ Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said.
Gray was taken into custody at the Gainesville Regional Youth Detention Center after being apprehended at the scene.
He has been described as a ‘quiet’ teen who would often skip class.
Local news outlets reported that law enforcement on Wednesday searched the teen’s family home in Bethlehem, Georgia, east of the high school.
The victims of the massacre in Winder have been named as teachers Christina Irimie, 53, and Richard Aspinwall, 39, and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14.
Classmate Lyela Sayerath told CNN that she was sat next to Gray in algebra class minutes before he began the shooting spree.
She said that Gray left the classroom at the beginning of their class at 9:45am, around half an hour before active shooter alerts sounded.
Gray didn’t take a bathroom pass, she said, leading her to initially think he was merely skipping class – before a loudspeaker announcement told teachers to check their emails.
Shortly after, Sayerath said Gray returned outside their classroom, and a student got up to open the door for him before jumping back at the sight of his gun.
‘I guess he saw we weren’t going to let him in. And I guess the classroom next to me, their door was open, so I think he just started shooting in the classroom,’ she said.
Sayerath said Gray proceeded to fire off a number of bullets ‘one after another’, adding: ‘When we heard it, most people just dropped to the floor and like kind of crawled in an area like piled on top of each other.’
The Division of Family and Children’s Services also had previous contact with the teen and will investigate whether that has any connection with the shooting.