Apalachee High school shooting timeline prompts four big questions

Why was the panic button alert processed two minutes after 911 calls started? Why did it take police officers at the school 8 minutes to find the shooter after the first shots were fired?

Two weeks after the school shooting at Apalachee High in Georgia, pieces of the timeline are starting to be released. This information prompts a bunch of new questions about the response, procedures, communication, and emergency equipment being used on campus.

Georgia police also confirmed the AR-15 rifle that he had hidden in his backpack was not collapsible or disassembled, and the weapon was legally purchased. The minimum legal length for a rifle barrel is 16”. Most AR-15s are between 30-40” with a barrel plus the chamber, grip, and stock. A normal backpack is about 20” so something isn’t adding up here.

Here is the timeline so far:

• Shooter rides the bus to school and enters the building with an AR-15 in his backpack around 8am.

• Shooter leaves class at 9:45am.

• Shooter's mother calls the school to warn them at 9:50am (10 minute phone call).

• Shooter prepares for attack inside a bathroom ~9:50-10:20am.

• SROs start searching for the shooter ~9:55-10:00am. They may be looking for Colton instead of Colt due to confusion with similar names.

• An administrator enters a classroom looking for the wrong student (Colton not Colt) at 10:00am.

• First shots fired at 10:20am.

• Authorities get the first 911 calls of an active shooter on campus at 10:20am.

• Due to the number of 911 calls at 10:20am, callers start getting automated messages for "high call volume".

• Alert for the shooting comes in from a “RapidSOS” device at 10:22am based on dispatch reports released by Barrow County, GA.

• Police engage the shooter at 10:28am and he surrenders.

• Shooter is reported "in custody" at 10:30am.

• All victims are transported by 10:52am.

My questions from the timeline

1. RapidSOS is an alerting system partnered with Centegix panic buttons. Why did it take 2 minutes longer to process a panic button alert than the 911 calls that started at 10:20am?

Following the Parkland shooting, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Tennessee, and Utah have passed Alyssa’s Law to mandate panic buttons in schools. There are Alyssa’s Law bills to mandate panic buttons proposed in 10 more states right now.

Alyssa’s Law is legislation to improve the response time of law enforcement during emergencies in public schools. It mandates that all public elementary and secondary school buildings be equipped with silent panic alarms that directly notify law enforcement.

To my knowledge, there have never been experiments conducted or published reports/data to test and measure if a panic button generates a faster alert than a 911 call. Buildings across the country have been equipped with automatic fire alarms since the 1970s. When most fire alerts are false alarms, fire departments classify these calls as a lower priority and respond with fewer units to an automatic alarm compared to a 911 call from a person. Based on a study in Chicago, the police response is slower to automatic ShotSpotter alerts than traditional 911 calls.

The panic button laws for schools were created after the Parkland shooting. This is a strange incident to be the reason for mandating these products because there was a school police officer present who immediately radioed for help. It was the officer’s inaction—not a lack of alerts to the 911 center—that has drawn scrutiny.

Ironically, the Parkland SRO’s civil defense was based on blaming faulty Motorola radios for his inaction. Motorola spent millions of dollars lobbying post-9/11 to gain a near monopoly on the public safety market while selling products that perform worse than pre-9/11 radios inside block construction buildings like schools.

If there is a legislative mandate to install panic buttons, this creates a huge market for vendors. A Centegix system costs a school roughly $8,000 per year. If panic buttons were mandated at every school across the country, that’s a $1.04B market.

• Who is funding the lobbying efforts to pass Alyssa’s Law?

• Why is a vendor who profits from this system writing school safety standards? (see more: "Shall" do what? Proposed security standard is a liability nightmare for school officials)

Just as I was writing this article, I got a sponsored email from Campus Safety Magazine with a featured product that is “the only Alyssa’s Law-compliant solution”. It feels like a red flag to me that meeting legislative mandates is the primary marketing tactic for these products.

In a resource constrained environment, new security tech like panic button badges may have distracted administrators from critical tasks like planning and training for an imminent threat. It’s clear that during the 30 minutes after the mother called the school, staff didn’t have a plan or training for what to do. When shots were fired and staff started pushing the panic buttons, it was already too late for the 13 students and staff struck by bullets.

A gunshot can be heard from a mile away and there are hundreds—or thousands—of people in and around a school campus who have cellphones. When a school shooting starts, there is not a lack of information being shared externally (e.g., people calling 911 to get police), there often is a lack of information being broadcast internally to student and staff. Police were on campus just as the shooting started at Uvalde, it was the students and staff inside the school that didn’t get the warnings (see: Three Key Findings Every School Should Know from DOJ Report on Uvalde).

On January 4 at Perry High in rural Iowa, a panic button was activated when a student opened fire near the cafeteria before the school day started killing a classmate, the principal, and wounding 7 others. When police arrived 7 minutes later, the teenage shooter had already committed suicide in the hallway. No information has been released about this school shooting and we don’t know why police took so long to respond to the automatic alarm at the school.

For school shooting scenarios, panic buttons often duplicate information that is already being shared with police without doing anything to filling the unmet need for students and staff inside the school to get notifications and information.

On the flip side, when panic buttons go off by accident at schools this creates a real emergency for students and staff who jump out of windows and run from the campus when a false alarm rings.

If panic button alerts are processed more slowly than 911 calls and they cost $8000 per school while a 911 call is free, what’s the point?

2. When the SROs were searching for the student and knew he was in math class, why did it take 8 minutes after the first shot for officers already on campus to find him?

Apalachee High is a huge multi-wing school building that sits on a shared campus with a middle and elementary school. It makes sense that with two officers working on campus, if shots were unexpectedly fired it would take a few minutes for them to run to the location of the shooting.

What’s strange about the response time at Apalachee High is that school police officers were already searching for the shooter when the attack started in the area near the classroom where he was expected to be.

• Where were the two school police officers located on campus when the shooting started?

• When 8 minutes passed between the first shot and detaining the shooter, did SROs go straight to the location of the shooting or stop for supplies on the way (e.g., some schools have ballistic shields and rifles inside a locker in the SRO’s office which creates a policy conflict between going to get equipment versus going straight to the location of the shooter)

• Why didn’t the SROs call for backup at 9:50am when the school got a phone call from the shooter’s mother?

3. Did anyone check the bathrooms while they were searching for the student?

In January 2024, a student at Perry High in Iowa carried a shotgun into his school inside a duffle bag and immediately went into a bathroom to prepare to commit the attack. In the spring of 2021, a 12-year-old girl came out of the bathroom at Rigby Middle (ID) with a handgun and planned to shoot 30-50 students, but she was subdued by a teacher. Later that fall, the Oxford, MI school shooter came out of the bathroom with a handgun and started shooting in the hallway. In both cases, they carried handguns into the school in their backpacks (most common way kids carry a concealed gun at school).

The same situation that happened at Apalachee High also played out in New York 20 years ago. Jon Romano was depressed and suicidal when he carried a shotgun inside a bag into Columbia High in 2004. He went into the bathroom to get ready for the attack and sent warning messages from a stall to his friends. (Listen: Episode 8: Why does a kid bring a shotgun to school? Convicted school shooter tells his story.)

I've recorded 80 shootings that took place in school bathrooms including a 15-year-old student who as fatally shot in Maryland last week.