by Ty Tagami | Sep 4, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Sasha Contreras was in Spanish class at Apalachee High School when the shooting started on Sept. 4 last year.
It was far enough away that she could not hear the gunfire, but an hour earlier she had been in math teacher Ana Cristina Irimie’s class.
Sasha, 17, said she left Irimie’s class happy, not realizing it would be the last time she would see her teacher alive.
Irimie was among those killed that morning, along with students Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn and coach Ricky Aspinwall.
Colt Gray, who was 14, has been charged with murder, and his father, Colin Gray, was charged in connection with arming his son.
Barrow County, meanwhile, has struggled to make sense of the incident.
Several current and former Apalachee High students gathered at the state Capitol Thursday to honor the dead while wrestling with their lingering trauma.
Kyra McConatha, who was a senior there, is in college now. She was attending a statistical reasoning class and remembers texting a final goodbye to her mother. She said she still dwells on who might come through one of the unlocked doors on her college campus.
Contreras said that is a common feeling at Apalachee High, where the hallway that was the site of the shooting remains closed.
“To this day,” she said, “we are hyper aware of our surroundings.”
She remembers crying in the field after the shooting, looking for her mother, who had been substitute teaching in a class in the same hallway as the gunfire. Contreras’ older sister, Layla, kept the text message that her sister sent her that morning. The lack of punctuation — “Layla it’s real it’s a shooting it’s me sasha I love you” — underscored the urgency.
The people who lived through that event said they hoped the memory of the dead does not fade. They remarked about how routine school shootings have become, but they had no solutions to end them.
Georgia lawmakers reacted to the mass shooting by adopting a sweeping school safety bill in March. House Bill 268 was a priority for Republican House Speaker Jon Burns and passed with broad bipartisan support.
The 57-page measure requires schools to maintain records on students with troubling behavior and then share those records promptly when the student transfers to a different school, as happened at Apalachee High. The new law also pays for more mental health services, giving each school district up to three state-funded student advocates, one for every 18,000 students.
The General Assembly also passed House Bill 105, effectively treating slain teachers in the same way as armed officers by doubling to $150,000 the compensation to loved ones when a teacher is killed “in the line of duty.”
Thursday’s commemoration was coordinated by Democrats in the state House. Their caucus leader, Rep. Carolyn Hugley, D-Columbus, said she is a grandmother and a gun owner.
“I know first-hand the responsibility that comes with that right,” Hugley said, “and I believe deeply that we can protect the Second Amendment, and we can protect second graders at the same time.”
No Republicans participated although state Sen. Frank Ginn, R-Danielsville, who represents part of Barrow County, stood nearby, watching.
Mental health, not guns, is the problem, he said, adding that he understands the grief. Ginn lost a son in a farming accident. “The pain never goes away,” he said.
Sasha said the shooting feels “surreal … like it happened not even a week ago.”
by Ty Tagami | Sep 2, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Former leaders of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gathered at the Georgia Capitol Tuesday at the invitation of Democratic lawmakers to express their concerns about the future of the Atlanta-based disease-fighting agency and the potential impact on the public.
The timing follows President Donald Trump’s decision last week to fire CDC Director Susan Monarez one month after the U.S. Senate confirmed her to the role.
Her termination came after U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ousted the scientific advisors who make vaccine recommendations to the CDC. Kennedy appointed new members to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Policy, which then raised questions about historic vaccination regimens that Kennedy had also questioned.
Dr. Debra Houry, who was the agency’s chief medical officer, was among several who quit last week after Monarez’s firing.
Houry worried that her former agency’s pending recommendations about the COVID-19 vaccine could make it more difficult to get immunized. She said vaccine skepticism is already having an impact.
“This past year, we saw over 200 pediatric deaths from the flu. That’s unacceptable. We shouldn’t be seeing kids dying from the flu,” Houry said.
Houry exited the CDC with Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who spent three decades at the agency and supervised the center for emerging diseases and vaccine safety.
Jernigan said he quit because he felt Kennedy was not being transparent about the process for developing vaccine policy. He said he believed Monarez was fired because she wanted to let science drive public health policy.
Jernigan also said the Trump administration had disrupted CDC funding that goes to states and local health agencies and that it could undermine local programs.
“That could be impacts on foodborne illness, detection of problems with restaurants, problems with giving vaccinations to kids … not knowing if your food is safe, if the water is safe,” he said.
Tuesday’s event was convened by Democrats in the state House and Senate who, with some of their eight CDC guests, blamed the Aug. 8 shooting at the agency’s headquarters near Emory University on misinformation and political rhetoric.
Rep. Saira Draper, D-Atlanta, called on Gov. Brian Kemp to publicly back the federal agency and to create a multi-state public health alliance. The governor declined to comment.
Despite the concerns expressed Tuesday about transparency under Sec. Kennedy, the CDC had already earned mistrust from a significant swath of the public. A woman named Melinda Hicks underscored that sentiment when she peppered Houry and Jernigan with questions about vaccine safety. A friend had died of “brain bleed” after taking a COVID-19 vaccine, said Hicks, who lives in Atlanta.
Houry and Jernigan tried to answer as she interrupted them, saying the CDC had multiple monitoring systems and tracked vaccine-related deaths.
Hicks said in a brief interview later that she had not been vaccinated herself and that she supported the firing of Monarez.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 30, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp threw his full support behind football coach Derek Dooley on Saturday, saying he believes the son of legendary Bulldogs coach Vince Dooley can unseat Democrat Jon Ossoff from the U.S. Senate next year.
“I am proud to endorse Derek Dooley, for United States Senate,” the two-term Republican governor said Saturday. “Derek is a fighter, a leader we can trust, and a true political outsider who has what it takes to defeat Jon Ossoff and make sure our state finally has a voice in the U.S. Senate that reflects our values.”
Kemp held his first public event for Dooley outside the University of Georgia’s Sanford Stadium before the Bulldogs routed Marshall University’s Thundering Herd 45-7.
Dooley, a political newcomer, said he hoped to bring Kemp’s conservative leadership style to Washington by beating Ossoff in November.
First, he will have to get through two GOP congressmen also competing for the GOP nomination.
U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons, was the first major political figure to jump into the race followed by U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson.
Both have aligned themselves with President Donald Trump, trying to win his potent base of support in the Republican primary.
Democrats responded by attacking Dooley’s record as a former coach for the University of Tennessee, calling him “failed and fired.” They also referenced the troubled history between Kemp and Trump.
The Georgia Democrats said Kemp’s endorsement “is fanning the flames of an already chaotic GOP U.S. Senate primary and guaranteeing a showdown between himself and Trump that could be worse than Dooley’s job-ending 2012 loss to Vanderbilt.”
by Ty Tagami | Aug 29, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp will promote Derek Dooley‘s bid to dislodge Democrat Jon Ossoff from the U.S. Senate by appearing with the Republican candidate Saturday before the University of Georgia game against Marshall University at Sanford Stadium.
The football coach and son of legendary Bulldogs coach and athletic director Vince Dooley formally entered the GOP primary in early August after floating the idea in June.
U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons, was the first major political figure to jump into the race followed by U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson.
Both have voting records aligned with President Donald Trump and his supporters, and Democrats have attacked them for it.
Dooley, a political newcomer, has no such record. So Democrats have been targeting his mainstream marketing, with Georgia Democratic Party Chair Charlie Bailey labeling him as a “failed and fired” former coach for the University of Tennessee.
Kemp, who is among a handful of politicians authorized by a 2021 state law to operate a “leadership committee” that can raise unlimited sums, will play on the popularity of Georgia football to help Dooley.
A spokesperson for Kemp said the governor will stand with Dooley while tailgating ahead of Saturday’s game. It will be their first public speaking engagement together for Dooley’s Senate campaign.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Members of the Republican-controlled State Election Board offered differing views on election security Thursday when lawmakers held their third of six listening sessions around the state.
Board members also disagreed about whether there is a problem.
“We can count our votes accurately on Election Day and we can trust the results,” board Chairman John Fervier said. Last year, he said, all 5.3 million ballots were scanned by an optical reader during an audit that found only 87 discrepancies, all but one due to human error during the counting of hand-marked ballots.
“That’s an incredible result that you would hope would silence a lot of the conspiracy theorists and naysayers that cause confusion by claiming that Georgia’s elections are rigged and unfair,” said Fervier, who was appointed to the board by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.
But Janelle King, another Republican appointee on the board, pointed to problematic elections, such as one in DeKalb County in 2022 when a candidate lost election to a seat on the county commission only to win after a hand recount. Technical errors in scanners caused the initial miscount.
“Ask DeKalb Commissioner Michelle Long Spears if technology is reliable,” said King, who was appointed to the board last year by state House Speaker Jon Burns, a Republican from Newington. “So, it’s not to say that technology is all bad, but to assume that technology doesn’t fail is inaccurate. And to make people who feel like technology should not be the sole purpose out to be quacks or crazy, it’s just completely absurd.”
Raffensperger’s office disagreed with King’s account, saying after the hearing that she had misrepresented what happened in the Dekalb election. Human error — “a programming issue” — caused the technology problem that caused the miscount, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office said.
“The ballots and the scanners were not synced properly. That’s user error, not the machine’s fault,” Robert Sinners said. “If I microwave something for 20 minutes and it explodes, is that the microwave’s fault?” He added that it was “so sad seeing people who have the correct information blatantly ignoring it as the alternative fits their narrative better.”
King, like several who testified at the hearing at North Georgia Technical College in Clarkesville, wants paper ballots. Paper is likely coming because the legislature outlawed the QR code readers now used by the Dominion voting machines. Georgia elections must be conducted without those digital codes starting in July.
Those pushing for change also argued that the board should get more taxpayer dollars to pay for investigators and technology systems, so it does not have to rely on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
Lawmakers stripped Raffensperger of his role on the board, known as the SEB, after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and Raffensperger rebuffed Trump’s demand to find him more votes.
Brad Carver, a metro Atlanta district chairman of the state Republican Party, testified for a third time Thursday, having presented to lawmakers at both prior meetings, in Atlanta in July and in Rockmart in early August.
The election board needs more staff and its own attorney to make local election officials comply with the law and to clear a backlog of election-related complaints, said Carver, who also advocated for paper ballots.
“You have county election boards that are not following the law. They’re continuing to not follow the law. And the way that we can ensure uniform application is to have the SEB enforce that if you give them the appropriate authority,” said Carver.
His evidence of problems was a slide he showed that indicated 104% of voting-age Georgians were registered to vote. Carver did not have an answer when a Republican lawmaker on the panel asked if the number of voters in the numerator included those purged or about to be purged because they had not voted in years.
Then Rep. Saira Draper, D-Atlanta, pounced.
If 104% of eligible Georgians had voted, Carver would have brought that statistic, she said.
“That would have been a red flag of something going wrong. This in and of itself is completely explained by the inactive slash active voter process,” she said, suggesting that Carver was “fear mongering” with misleading statistics.
The meeting revealed deep personal divisions on the board, with its recently hired executive director, James W. Mills, publicly excoriating Fervier, who is technically one of his bosses.
“After almost 30 years of being in and out of the state, I’ve never served under a more dysfunctional, dishonest chairman than Chairman John Fervier,” said Mills, 62, a former state representative and member of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles who has been in his new role for a few months.
Draper later called that attack embarrassing, saying she felt like she was at home managing fights between kids. She also questioned whether Mills had the requisite expertise for his new job, and he responded that nearly two decades of running for office was experience enough.
The House Election Procedures Study Committee will hold another hearing on Sept. 18 at Savannah Tech.
UPDATE: This article was amended with comment from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office
