CNN
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School resource officers Chase Boyd and Brandon King ran toward the sound of gunfire and rounded a corner inside a Winder, Georgia, high school to find a hallway shrouded in dust and smoke — and through the haze, the silhouette of a shooter.

“The reason he’s still alive is because we couldn’t see him to shoot him,” Boyd said. Barrow News-Journal of the 14-year-old accused of opening fire Sept. 4 at Apalachee High School, killing two students and two teachers. Seven others were injured.

The officials’ comments to the newspaper were their first public account of the shooting, which authorities previously said ended with the gunman surrendering to deputies once confronted.

“God was a big factor that day,” King said, also nodding to the training he and Boyd had undergone before the shooting. “If it wasn’t for God, I wouldn’t be here today … We did what God put us here to do.”

The Barrow County Sheriff’s Office declined a CNN request to interview deputies Thursday, saying they were unavailable.

A series of revelations in the aftermath of the shooting have raised questions about whether more could have been done to prevent it. Particular focus has been placed on accused the shooter’s father — who allegedly gave her son access to the weapon used despite knowledge of his deteriorating mental health — and his mother’s claim that she called the school that morning to warn of a “extreme emergency” after receiving a disturbing text from his son. The sheriff has said there was no prior warning of a possible threat.

But the deputies and their fast answers have been credited by stopping the shooting before the shooter could claim more victims. And it highlights the critical role law enforcement can play in the early moments of a school shooting, offering a contrast to cases like the 2022 shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where scores of officers waited for 77 minutes to confront a gunman who killed 21 people, mostly children.

“Our mindset has to be that we’re probably going to get shot,” Boyd told the News-Journal.

“Whether we die or not is a toss up,” he added, “but our job is to stop the shooter from taking more lives.”

Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith – as previously reported CNN-connected WANF Boyd and King were “the true heroes” — confirming to CNN that the deputies’ experience has already led to changes in his agency’s active shooter training, inspiring the use of smoke machines to mimic a low-visibility environment.

Boyd usually works at another school, the News-Journal reported, but had gone to Apalachee High that morning to drop off a Bible to a student there. When the shooting began, the pair of school resource officers were in the school atrium talking about the evening’s Bible study, which would focus on Ephesians 6:10-18.

The first two verses of one translation read:

When the gunfire erupted, it sounded “like a muffled snare drum” because of the way the sound traveled through the school’s hallways, Boyd said. Several teachers, he said, had mistakenly thought the sound of gunfire was students kicking lockers.

The two deputies ran towards the sound, they told the newspaper. “It wasn’t until we kept getting closer that it started to register more like the sound of gunfire,” King said.

The News-Journal reported that it only took a verbal command for the shooter to surrender and drop the AR rifle Investigators said he had been hiding in his backpack that morning. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said the gunman was arrested at 10:26 a.m. — several minutes after police received the first reports of an active shooter.

“My personal belief is whatever demon or whatever was in that child to cause him to do pure evil … left when God rounded that corner,” Boyd told the News-Journal.

“We’re just regular people,” Boyd said. “Through the scriptures you can see where God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things.”

Deputies have since worked to comfort the school community still reeling from the shooting eight weeks later, and to reassure them of their safety.

“We want to help give the students and staff comfort that they are as safe as they can be with us here,” King told the paper.

“We want everyone to know how quickly we reacted – not for recognition, but for their peace of mind,” he added. “It wasn’t hours or minutes. It was seconds.”