Georgia high school shooting: Mother, daughters exchange frantic texts during shooting

Abby, Isabella and mother Sonya Turner at an Atlanta Braves game in 2023.

At 10.23am on Wednesday, Abby Turner texted her mother from her second-period biology class at Apalachee High School, east of Atlanta in the US state of Georgia. There was a lockdown at the school. It wasn’t a drill.

Her mom asked where she was in the classroom.

“i can’t explain it i’m shaking to much,” Abby replied, according to text messages shared with The Washington Post.

Abby and her friends had heard banging outside. They opened the classroom door and saw police in the hallway, then ran to the back of the room and hid behind a long lab table.

“That’s when I thought I heard shots,” Abby, who is 15, said in an interview. “It was like quick.”

Like an automatic weapon.

A father walks by Apalachee High School with his son on his shoulders as after a school shooting. Photo / Getty Images

Her teacher gave everyone instructions in a voice that was soft but very direct: “Get down, be quiet, don’t move, don’t talk.”

“I was nervous and couldn’t breathe,” Abby said. “I was just sitting with my friend, hugging her.”

That’s when she texted her mother. “I wanted to do it in case I couldn’t do it later,” she said. “It was my first instinct.”

Reading these messages at home, Sonya Turner first called her husband to tell him something was up but that maybe, despite their older daughter’s text, it was just a drill. Then she called back: “It’s real, it’s real, please go to the school,” she told him. Derrick Turner took off, soon waiting near the perimeter while emergency vehicles sped onto the campus.

Turner heard from their younger daughter, who is a ninth-grader. Both she and her sister were safe but terrified. The three connected via a group text, one girl saying she didn’t know what to do. Turner typed: “Pray …”

“I did. Like 8 times,” answered Isabella Faith Turner, 14. Mom then texted the words of the Lord’s Prayer and told the girls to keep praying. “I love you!” she added.

“I love you,” Isabella responded. And then, “Mommy im scared.”

“Dad is coming,” Turner replied. “We are coming.”

Turner spent part of the day waiting for news with another mother, a friend whose husband is in law enforcement and who was heading to the scene. That mom could not reach her son. “I’m watching her life fall apart,” Turner said. Both were imagining the worst.

Finally, the other mom got through to him. “He was in the classroom where the first teacher was shot and killed,” Turner said.

Turner had been resting at home on Wednesday morning because of abdominal surgery she underwent about a week ago. While she knew her husband was already at the campus and would get to the girls as soon as he could, waiting was still torturous. She finally decided she had to go – though she had to walk most of the mile and a half, because cars of arriving parents were parked the entire route from her house to the school and beyond.

The students had been moved into the football stadium to wait. There, Abby met up with a friend with a terrifying story.

“When I found her we were both crying,” Abby said. Then her friend showed her the blood on her shoes. She told Abby she had tried to help after her teacher was shot.

“She said that nobody wanted to get up,” Abby said.

Eventually, the two parents were reunited with their two daughters. The family all came home shaken.

“They’re okay right now,” Turner said. “But it hasn’t hit them.”