The four victims of the latest mass shooting at a U.S. school were two teenage students and two teachers.
Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, both 14, were killed Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie were both math teachers at the school. Aspinwall was also an assistant football coach.
They all died at the hands of a troubled student, who was also 14 and armed with a clone of the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle that has been used in numerous deadly school shootings across America, authorities said.
As Winder, a town of 18,000 about an hour's drive from Atlanta, braced for a round of funerals, portraits began to emerge of the four victims who died in what was supposed to be a safe space.
“Those that are deceased are heroes in my book,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said after their bodies were identified.
Christian Angulo
His family was plunged into grief after it was revealed that he was one of two students who had been fatally shot.
“He was only 14 years old. He was a very good kid and very sweet and so caring,” said Angulo’s older sister, Lisette, who set up a GoFundMe page for her brother. “He was so loved by many. His loss was so sudden and unexpected. We are truly heartbroken. He really didn’t deserve this.”
Mason Schermerhorn
Friends of his mother told The New York Times that the teenager had recently started at Apalachee and was looking forward to an upcoming vacation at Walt Disney World.
“He really enjoyed life,” Doug Kilburn, 40, a friend who has known Schermerhorn’s mother for a decade, told the newspaper. “He always had an upbeat attitude about everything.”
Lilianah Ahmed, who identified herself as Schermerhorn’s sister, wrote in an Instagram post that her brother “did not make it out of the school alive,” "TODAY" reported.
In a since-deleted post, Ahmed also wrote that her brother had autism, "TODAY" reported.
Cristina Irimie
One of the slain math teachers, Irimie, 53, was a member of the Romanian immigrant community in the Atlanta area.
"She dedicated her life to shaping the minds and hearts of students and the community," family friend Corneliu Caprar wrote on the GoFundMe page he organized to raise money for her funeral.
Caprar's appeal for donations was written in both English and Romanian and featured a photo of Irimie with a garland of flowers in her hair.
Her friend, Silvia Pasch, 65, said they met about seven years ago at Saints Constantine and Helen Church outside Atlanta, where they sometimes volunteered and helped raise money for the church.
“I can’t explain the sadness, thinking how I’m not going to see her anymore,” she said.
Pasch remembers her friend gathering children from the church to organize a folk dance at a festival earlier this year.
“The shooting is a tragedy,” Pasch said. “She was a special person. Anytime she could help, she would.”
Richard Aspinwall
In addition to being a math teacher, Aspinwall was a 39-year-old married father of two daughters and the defensive coordinator of the Apalachee Wildcats football team.
Ariel Bowling, a 15-year-old student at Apalachee High School, said on "TODAY" that Aspinwall was her math teacher and the “most kindest soul ever.”
“I would just want people to know that he was a really kindhearted man, and he would really push you and he was just really hard-working,” Bowling said.
John Poitevint, head football coach at Mountain View High School in nearby Gwinnett County, said Aspinwall coached special teams and defensive backs on his staff for three years until 2022. He said they last spoke two week ago.
“He was a tremendous person, he put himself last,” Poitevint said. “He was very humble. You knew if you ever needed help, he’d be there for you.”
Poitevint said he found out about the shooting not long after it happened and tried calling Aspinwall.
“I was just hoping everyone was OK, and never thought it would’ve been him, to be honest,” Poitevint said. “I kept trying to reach Ricky, but obviously, I didn’t hear anything back. He was my right-hand man."
On Thursday, Robert McCrimmon and Jaden Hunter, 17-year-old seniors, each carried a bouquet of flowers to the school’s flagpole, where students and community members memorialized their fallen classmates and teachers.
McCrimmon, who mentioned that authorities knew of a previous threat made by the alleged shooter, said that “if precautionary things had been done, we wouldn’t be here and in this pain.”
Hunter said people were traumatized.
“I don’t know if I can go back into the school,” she said. “Right now, I don’t want to. It’s very sad because it seems like it could have been prevented if you knew he had said he would do something like this.”
