Apalachee teacher fatally shot by his classroom doorway: ‘He was trying to crawl back to us’
(WINDER, Ga.) — When a gunman opened fire outside Stephanie Reyna’s classroom at Apalachee High School in Georgia, killing math teacher and football coach Richard Aspinwall, she said her classmates jumped into action, shutting and barricading their door.
The chaos began when Reyna, 17, said her class “heard banging on the lockers right outside of the classroom door.”
Brayan Maldonado, also 17, said it sounded like someone had been pushed up against a locker.
“My teacher, Coach Aspinwall, he opened the door, and he ran outside to see what’s going on,” Reyna told ABC News.
“We heard some popping sounds,” Reyna said. “We just stopped, we froze, we didn’t know what was going on. … So we all ran to the back of the classroom. We hid in the corner.”
Reyna said she and her 17 classmates were lying on the ground for several minutes when they heard more popping sounds.
“That’s when we realized that our classroom door was still open,” Reyna said.
Maldonado said he started to hear “a little bit of breathing” and “a little bit of groaning.”
The students then saw Aspinwall on the ground, they said.
“He was just there, in the doorway, just laying there,” Reyna said. “He was trying to crawl back to us … we just think he was trying to get to us.”
“A couple minutes passed by. He’s taking his breaths,” Maldonado said. “And then we hear his final breaths.”
“Then one of my classmates got the courage to stand up from his position of hiding” and drag Aspinwall’s body into their classroom, Maldonado said.
“That encouraged me to stand up,” Maldonado said.
He said he and his classmates closed the door and barricaded it with cabinets, desks and chairs.
“We were just putting anything we possibly could to make sure [the shooter] couldn’t get in,” Maldonado said.
Once the door was secured, Reyna and Maldonado said they tried to console their classmates.
“Some were hyperventilating, some were crying,” Maldonado said. “I was really trying to calm everyone down. Once everyone was calm, I got calm and all the feelings kicked in.”
Reyna said first responders evacuated the students to another classroom before they joined the rest of the school at the football field.
Aspinwall, fellow teacher Christina Irimie, and two students were killed in Wednesday morning’s shooting in Winder. Nine others were injured.
The 14-year-old suspect, Colt Gray, a student at the school, surrendered at the scene to the school resource officers and was taken into custody, authorities said.
Gray is charged with four counts of felony murder and will be tried as an adult, authorities said. A motive is not known.
(ASHBURN, Va.) — A suspect has been identified in a burglary reported at a Trump for President 2024 campaign office in Virginia, authorities said Wednesday.
The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office said it has secured a warrant for the arrest of Toby Shane Kessler, 39, on the charge of burglary in connection with a break-in reported at the office in Ashburn on Sunday night.
The sheriff’s office said it is working with other law enforcement agencies to locate Kessler, who they said does not have a fixed address and has a California driver’s license.
The burglary occurred at approximately 8:11 pm on Sunday and was captured by surveillance cameras inside the office, the sheriff’s office said.
Investigators determined the suspect “forced entry into a back door of the location and spent a brief period of time inside before leaving,” the sheriff’s office said in a press release.
“He appears to have left nothing behind, and it is still unclear what, if anything, he took with him,” the sheriff’s office said, adding the investigation is ongoing.
The suspect was captured in the surveillance footage wearing dark clothing, a dark cap and a backpack. The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office asked anyone who believes they have seen Kessler to contact them at 571-918-1869.
“Mr. Kessler has a history of criminal behavior and appears to have been in the Washington metropolitan area at least since 2018,” the sheriff’s office said.
The campaign office, which is leased, also serves as the headquarters of the Virginia 10th District Republican Committee, the sheriff’s office said.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’ press secretary, Chloe Smith, said Tuesday that their office was monitoring the situation.
“It’s outrageous that anyone would break into a political office,” Smith said in a statement to ABC News. “Criminal acts are not tolerated in Virginia.”
(WINDER, Ga.) — Colt Gray, the 14-year-old suspect in the Apalachee High School shooting, is set to face a judge Friday for his arraignment.
This will mark the first court appearance for the teenager, who authorities allege killed four people, including two teachers and two students, at his high school and injured nine others. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations previously said he will be tried as an adult.
He has been charged with four counts of felony murder, with additional charges expected, the GBI said. Gray surrendered at the scene to the school resource officers, according to the GBI.
He was taken into custody on Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. ET, seven minutes after the initial service call went out, according to the Barrow County Sheriff’s Office, which employs the school resource officers.
On Thursday night, Colin Gray, the father of the 14-year-old, was arrested and charged with murder in connection with the deadly shooting, the GBI said.
Colin Gray, 54, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the GBI said.
At a news conference on Thursday evening, Chris Hosey, director of the GBI said that the father was arrested for “knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a weapon.”
It is currently unclear when Colin Gray is expected to appear in court or whether he has obtained legal counsel following his arrest.
(BERKELEY, Calif.) — Two weeks ago, as college students returned to campus at the University of California, Berkeley, some of the most senior officials in the FBI were huddling inside a nondescript conference room beneath the stands of the school’s football stadium.
“Here’s where the rubber meets the road,” one of the FBI officials told the group of law enforcement officials, academics, tech developers, venture capitalists, and crime victims.
The problem they’re trying to solve, according to officials, is that the FBI is losing its ability to fight some of the greatest threats facing Americans, because phones and other electronic devices are increasingly being designed with no way for authorities to access their contents when the law authorizes them to collect evidence regarding suspected crimes — including those committed by radical terrorists, fentanyl dealers and online child predators.
It’s hardly a new problem.
“[It’s] the same conversation we had yesterday, five years ago, and 10 years ago, and 15 years ago, and now 20 years ago,” a professor told the group. “There’s something depressing about that. … We keep making the same goddamn mistakes over and over again.”
That’s why the FBI has taken the unusual step of turning to an academic institution for help. And not just any academic institution, but Berkeley — considered to be the birthplace of the Free Speech and student protest movements of the 1960s.
“To their credit, they were willing to think outside the box,” former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who now runs a center at Berkeley focused on security, said of the FBI.
‘A historic milestone’
A generation ago, such a partnership would have seemed unthinkable. In the 1950s and ’60s, in the midst of the Cold War, the FBI reportedly targeted a wide swath of Berkeley professors and students with surveillance and other secret tactics, convinced that radical Communists were among them.
Now, however, the FBI is battling a very different set of threats — and a new generation of advanced technologies.
Last year, the FBI signed an agreement with Napolitano’s center, the Center for Security in Politics, vowing to exchange resources and technology related expertise in a shared effort to support the FBI’s mission.
In a press release at the time, Napolitano touted the arrangement as “the first collaboration of its kind” and “a historic milestone for both institutions.”
The meeting two weeks ago was one of the first in-person gatherings to come out of the agreement.
The gathering involved three sessions spread over two days, and ABC News was allowed to observe the closing session on the condition that it not name any of the speakers.
One FBI official framed the final session by noting that while the FBI brings “enormous resources to bear” in significant or high-profile cases, “we don’t have the people, we don’t have the financial resources to do that” in the many thousands of other cases the FBI pursues each day.
“[That] is why we need to work with our private sector partners to have a lawful-access solution for our garden-variety cases,” the FBI official said during the session.
Instead of trying to address the many types of threats investigated by the FBI, the summit focused on just one: finding ways to stop child exploitation and the spread of sexual abuse material online.
“I think there’s a universal recognition that that stuff is bad, and we need to figure out a way to better deal with it,” Napolitano told ABC News.
‘A really egregious trend’
More children than ever are being exploited online, as predators use newer technologies like live-streaming apps, online video games and advanced messaging platforms to solicit sexual material from them, according to Abbigail Beccaccio, who heads the FBI’s section focused on violent crimes against children.
Beccaccio told ABC News there’s been a significant shift in these cases as they’ve exploded in number.
While the FBI had long seen cases of “traditional sextortion,” when predators with a sexual interest in young girls trick them into sharing explicit images of themselves, the FBI has in recent years seen a “huge uptick” in so-called “financially motivated sextortion” targeting boys, Beccaccio said.
In such cases, the victims are tricked into sharing sexually explicit images of themselves — but “that’s where the scheme turns,” said Beccaccio. Armed with the compromising material, the perpetrator then threatens the victim with claims of, “If you don’t send me money, I will ruin your life, I will send this to all your friends and family,” Beccaccio said.
In less than 18 months, from October 2021 to March 2023, the FBI counted more than 12,600 victims of such schemes — a “huge” and “shocking number,” as Beccaccio put it.
She said she knows of cases where children even dipped into their college savings accounts to pay the criminals who targeted them. But worst of all, she said, “We began to see a really egregious trend in suicides.”
Beccaccio said that helps illustrate why she and her FBI colleagues are so adamant that law enforcement needs some way to access criminals’ devices when a judge authorizes it.
“Without lawful access, we lose the ability to obtain the information we need to prosecute the offenders and rescue these child victims,” she warned.
The public, she said, should find that “troubling.”
‘A very dark place’
A decade ago, as highly-encrypted phone apps became commonplace, the FBI tried to engage the public in a national conversation about the future of lawful access. Then-FBI director James Comey warned that “going dark” by losing lawful access to personal data would lead to law enforcement agencies “missing out” on chances to stop “some very dangerous people.”
“Criminals and terrorists would like nothing more than for us to miss out,” he warned during an October 2014 speech in Washington, D.C. “Encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place.”
The issue came to a head a year later, when for several months the FBI was unable to unlock an Apple iPhone left behind by one of ISIS-inspired terrorists who killed 14 people and injured nearly two dozen others during an attack in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015.
There were congressional hearings held on the issue, and the FBI even took the matter to federal court, seeking to force Apple to find a way for authorities to access the phone’s content. The case became moot after an Israeli security company found a way to unlock the perpetrator’s phone.
“It’s so seductive to talk about privacy as the ultimate value,” Comey told a House panel in March 2016. “[But] in a society where we aspire to be safe and have our families safe and our children safe, that can’t be. We have to find a way to accommodate both.”
But the FBI’s public campaign over lawful access appeared to lose steam after FBI leadership become engulfed in a controversy surrounding the 2016 presidential election and Comey was fired as the agency’s director in May 2017.
Now — more than seven years later — the FBI is trying to spark the conversation again.
Katie Noyes, the head of the FBI’s next-generation technology section, said that in a survey of the FBI’s field offices last year, the bureau identified nearly 17,000 active cases that were either stalled or missing key evidence due to “warrant-proof encryption.”
Just two months ago, as the FBI struggled to determine why a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, Abbate, the deputy director, told lawmakers that the shooter had used encrypted applications and that, more than two weeks after the shooting, the FBI was still unable “to get information back because of their encrypted nature.”
“We need a solution that provides lawful access to law enforcement,” Abbate implored lawmakers during a Senate hearing on the assassination attempt.
So the FBI is turning to Napolitano and her team at Berkeley for help.
‘Waiting for the market’
The summit at Berkeley was led by Napolitano’s team and an array of FBI officials, including deputy director Abbate; Jeff Fields, the head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s San Francisco field office; and members of the agency’s technology units.
Victims of online sexual exploitation, including a woman whose likeness appeared in a “deepfake” video that went viral, also shared their stories and perspectives.
“What was really wonderful about this convening was having really disparate points of view around the same table,” Noyes told ABC News, adding that some of the tech companies and venture capitalists there said they had never heard directly from victims before.
The group got into an impassioned debate over whether tech companies, especially global giants such as Apple and Meta — neither of whom participated in the summit — would ever voluntarily redesign their devices and platforms to ensure that law enforcement could access them with a court order.
One law enforcement official noted that the FBI spoke with the companies a decade ago, but they had little interest in having a conversation about changing their ways.
“Waiting for the market here is not going to get it done,” said another law enforcement official, insisting that the only thing that will bring change is Congress passing a new law.
Others rejected that view, saying that the point of holding the summit is to potentially find other ways to address the problem.
“There hasn’t been much movement at all, but on the other hand the technology has changed,” Napolitano told ABC News after the summit. “And so there may be better and more available ways for government — meaning law enforcement — to get around some of the traditional barriers to lawful access, and those were part of the discussions today.”
‘What’s next?’
Noyes emphasized that she and her colleagues at the FBI are “big fans of encryptions” for personal security and privacy — and that the FBI is not trying to expand or change what it’s legally allowed to do.
As she described it, the FBI just wants ensure that law enforcement maintains the type of access that it has long used to bring criminals to justice.
“There’s no discussion around a request for any additional authority,” she said. “In many cases we have had this access, and it has been removed or taken away over time” due to newer technology.
According to Noyes, the summit produced a number of ideas and proposed approaches.
Some participants suggested that an independent third party could hold a technology company’s access keys in “escrow,” so those keys would not be in the hands of law enforcement but could be used under court order.
There was also discussion about “homomorphic encryption,” a type of encryption that can keep data encrypted even as that data is processed or even shared.
Napolitano said the summit two weeks ago was just the beginning.
“The challenge for us is, ‘OK, now we’ve had these discussions, what’s next?'” she said.
NOTE: If your child is the victim of a predator or you know someone who is a victim, you can always call 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit information online at tips.fbi.gov.