BARROW COUNTY, GA — Too little, too late? The lawyer for the grieving family of a 14-year-old boy hopes it doesn’t take another deadly attack for schools to improve security.
Andy Rogers of the Atlanta law firm Deitch + Rogers represents Ismael Angulo, Jr., the father of Christian Angulo. Christian was one of two students killed in the September 4, 2024 mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia.
Colt Gray is accused of opening fire inside the school with a black semi-automatic AR-15-style rifle during 2nd period.
Two students, Angulo and 14-year-old Mason Schermerhorn, and two teachers, 39-year-old Richard Aspinwall and 53-year-old Cristina Irimie, were killed. Nine others were injured.
Apalachee is beginning its new school year with upgraded security, including weapon detectors. The district also approved hiring additional school police officers, and more security features are in the pipeline.
Rogers asks why it took a deadly mass shooting before new security measures were installed.
“If you spend two seconds Googling history of school shootings in U. S., you can see that this ain’t new,” says Rogers.
Rogers questions what appear to be missed warning signs about a troubled boy and inadequate security. He says the revamped security plan is encouraging, but frustrating that it came after lives were lost.
“You know, we might think about what could’ve been done in the moment, but we’re equally if not more concerned and interested in finding out what could and should have been done in the hours, days, and weeks--if not longer--leading up to the incident,” he says.
The lawyer, who solely represents crime victims and their families, contends the system failed the Apalachee High community.
“Everything they’re putting in place now is not new and it didn’t get invented this year. It wasn’t created out of whole cloth after September of 2024,” says Rogers.
Now, he believes, there must be not just accountability, but change.
“A cynical way to think about this is, lawsuits can scare people into doing the right thing, and that might work for some...but my God, it should frankly be the last motivation,” Rogers says. “The primary motivation ought to be, there are things we can do now to prevent families from having to ever deal with anything like this, ever.”
That is why Rogers believes this can serve as a warning for schools everywhere. He urges school systems to review and revamp their own security protocols before it’s too late. School, he says, is where kids are vulnerable.
“Education is obviously important. The kids need to be fed. But first and foremost, they need to be sure that they’re not going to get physically or emotionally harmed when they go to school,” says Rogers.
Even simple things like clear backpacks can provide a layer of security, he notes. Rogers speculates that the accused teen shooter likely would not have been able to hide a long, semi-automatic gun in a transparent backpack, and that if he’d arrived with a different type of bag, he would’ve been stopped and searched at the door.
He also acknowledges that school administrators and school board members have a hard job.
“It’s a lot,” says Rogers.
Meanwhile, he says the Angulo family and others will continue pressing for much-needed answers in what is sure to be a long, agonizing process.
“If you’ve lost a child or you’ve had a child who’s been seriously injured, you and nobody else knows what that’s like,” says Rogers, “and you want to make sure that nobody has to go through that. No other family, no other child has to suffer.”
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