The deadly shooting at a Georgia high school on Wednesday has drawn attention to the school’s use of a panic button system to alert people of the threat.
Two students and two teachers were killed when the 14-year-old suspect opened fire at Apalachee High School in Winder, authorities said. Nine other people were also injured, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said.
The suspect, Colt Gray, 14, a student at Apalachee High School, was arrested by three school protective services officers and immediately surrendered, according to Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith. He was taken into custody at 10:30 a.m. ET, seven minutes after the initial call, according to the Barrow County Sheriff’s Office, which employs the school protective services officers.
Gray has been charged with four counts of murder in connection with the shooting, with additional charges expected, the GBI said. He is being charged as an adult.
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Smith said all teachers at the school have a credential made by security technology company CENTEGIX that allows them to press a button to alert them of an “active situation.” The button was pushed during Wednesday’s shooting, and school resource officers began “actively searching,” he said.
“When the shooting started, they interacted with the shooter, Mr. Gray, and as soon as they made contact with him, he immediately gave up,” Smith said.
Teachers have been receiving their badges for about a week, he said. Aug. 1 was the first day of classes at Apalachee High School.
CENTEGIX CEO Brent Cobb told ABC News that several people had raised concerns about a lockdown situation on Wednesday.
The tragedy hits close to home for the Atlanta-based company: Winder is about 45 miles from Atlanta.
Cobb called students, teachers and emergency personnel “heroes” in how they responded to the shooting.
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“We’ve seen descriptions of how they’ve used the platform, and we hope and believe that it’s had a positive impact in the face of a very tragic circumstance,” Cobb told ABC News.
The company said its discreet technology “speeds up emergency response by minimizing the time it takes to identify, notify and respond to an emergency.” The badges, which users tend to keep with their staff IDs, have two alerts: one to notify administrators of incidents such as student altercations and medical emergencies, and a second to issue a campus-wide “lockdown” alert for extreme situations that also notifies 911, according to its website. A vibration tailored to the type of alert, as well as an LED, would be triggered to confirm that the signal has been transmitted. The badge would also indicate exactly where the user is on campus for responders.
Most alerts concern “everyday emergencies,” such as behavioral or medical incidents, which accounted for more than 98% of alerts analyzed during fall 2022, CENTEGIX found.
Pressing the badge button three times contacts administrators, while pressing it eight times triggers the lockdown request — which typically also triggers strobe lights, messages on computer screens and a pre-recorded intercom message telling the school community what to do, Cobb said.
“These multi-sensory notifications … that’s what gets people to safety. That’s what really drives a lot of rescue activity in these types of emergencies,” Cobb said. “We can’t prevent things from happening, but we can help mitigate the problem.”
Stephen Kreyenbuhl, a 10th-grade world history teacher at Apalachee High School, told ABC News he saw his interactive whiteboard change to “strict lockdown” before he even heard gunshots, giving him time to prepare and start herding students into a corner.
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“My colleague turned on the lights. I took a pair of scissors,” he said. “We practice it every semester, throughout this lockdown. So we practice it quite frequently.”
He said the door was already locked, so no one could enter the classroom.
Former FBI agent Brad Garrett, an ABC News contributor, said the locked doors and panic system likely saved lives.
“If you think about how much darker it could have been … imagine what would have happened if there hadn’t been locked doors, imagine what would have happened if there hadn’t been security guards in the school,” he said. “And those panic buttons saved a lot of time and, in my opinion, probably saved a lot of lives.”
Questions remain in the shooting investigation, including the teen suspect’s alleged motive and how he allegedly brought the firearm — described by authorities as an AR-style weapon — into the school. The school reserves the right to use “portable” metal detectors, according to its school policy manual, though it was unclear whether they were in use Wednesday.
CENTEGIX’s crisis alert platform was inspired by the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, 2018, Cobb said.
“We sat down and, from a forensic perspective, asked ourselves how we could have helped. What could we do to potentially create a better outcome in this kind of tragedy? We started by asking ourselves those kinds of questions a lot.”
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According to the company, more than 600,000 CENTEGIX wearable security badges are in use in K-12 schools. More than 75 percent of Georgia schools use the company’s platform, Cobb said. That includes school districts in Cobb, Fulton and Douglas counties, according to the company’s website.
Some state lawmakers are pushing to make silent crisis alert systems like CENTEGIX’s mandatory in schools. In 2020, the Florida Legislature passed what’s known as Alyssa’s Law, which in part requires all public schools to implement a mobile panic alert system. The law is named for Alyssa Alhadeff, a 14-year-old student who was among the 17 victims killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Georgia lawmakers introduced a version of Alyssa’s Law last year, though it failed to pass out of committee.
National School Safety and Security Service President Ken Trump said school security measures, such as panic buttons, have an “emotional” effect to reassure people. But he stressed that they are not a preventative measure against school violence and that every school shooting has “different characteristics.”
“We try to learn from these incidents and take lessons from them, but what comes out of a particular incident may not be transferable to all schools and any potential future incidents that occur,” he said.
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