Mason Schermerhorn | Source: Artisea Bethea/GoFundMe
A steady stream of donations to the tune of six figures and counting will help to support the grieving family of the lone Black person killed in this week’s school shooting in Georgia.
An online crowdfunding account set up for the family of Mason Schermerhorn — one of the two 14-year-old victims of the mass shooting at Apalachee High School in the city of Winder on Wednesday morning — has generated nearly 4,000 donations as of Friday morning and had already exceeded its initial goal.
A friend of Schermerhorn’s mother created the account on the GoFundMe website and remembered the teenage victim of gun violence as “the sweetest most loving soul with the biggest smile and will be missed dearly.”
Schermerhorn’s sister remembered her younger brother as a regular kid who looked up to her.
“PS5, VR headset. He loved playing Roblox and Genshin,” Alanna Schermerhorn told Fox 5. “He just started learning to play the trumpet, and he did it because I play the trumpet. He said he wanted to be like me when he got older.”
Alanna also said her brother “loved everyone, no matter what they had or what disabilities they had; he loved everyone for who they were.”
A lot is being shared about the suspect of the #Apalachee_High_School shooting. More needs to be shared on victims. This thread of videos from Mason Schermerhorn’s family & shows his hobbies, interests, smile & laughter. His sister, Alanna says he was full of energy & positivity pic.twitter.com/ihQAh6O31L
— Brittany Edney (@BrittanyEdney) September 6, 2024
Nearly immediately following the shooting, Schermerhorn’s photo was circulating on social media, with at least two news outlets misidentifying him as the shooter instead of one of the four people killed in a shooting for which Apalachee High School student Colt Gray has been charged with.
Gray, 14, is white, making it unclear how media outlets could have mistaken him for Schermerhorn.
The news outlets — WSB-TV, which is headquartered in Atlanta, and the Daily Mail, a right-wing tabloid — ultimately deleted the social media posts falsely identifying Schermerhorn as the suspect. Still, neither appeared to have issued any kind of formal correction or acknowledgment of the egregious error along racial lines.
The topic of race is also applicable to another aspect of the shooting: The police response.
Questions mounted on social media about how the police managed to apprehend Gray — who allegedly carried out the carnage via a high-powered assault rifle that his father gave him as a gift — without resorting to the kind of lethal force that law enforcement has been known to use against unarmed Black people “suspected” of doing far less than committing mass murder in an educational facility.
A GoFundMe for Christian Angulo, 14, the other student killed in the shooting, was created to raise money to pay for his funeral. Like Schermerhorn’s, that fundraiser garnered a significant number of donations and was rapidly approaching its goal of $150,000 as of Wednesday morning.
Apalachee High School teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, were also killed in the shooting.
Gray stands charged with four counts of murder and was scheduled to make his first court appearance on Friday morning.
Gray’s father, Colin Gray, was arrested Thursday night and charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children.
This is America.
SEE ALSO:
Rep. Mike Collins ‘Praying’ For Georgia School Shooting Victims Spotlights His Gun Ads
Georgia, Kamala Harris And A Study On Guns Showing Why Black Children And Teens Are At Most Risk
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