Fifteen-Year-Old Boy Shoots And Wounds Six Students At Conyers, GA, High School

Jet, June 7, 1999

A month after the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO, a 15-year-old White boy in Georgia armed with two guns opened fire and wounded six students in his school.

Witnesses said the gunman had a rifle and a handgun, both .22 caliber.

The suspect, identified by students as Thomas Solomon, ran and shot at no one in particular; he fired at students below the waist so as not to kill them, witnesses said.

Solomon, a sophomore at Heritage High School in Conyers, GA, reportedly was upset over a broken romance, according to news reports.

Solomon was charged as a juvenile with aggravated assault, and prosecutors also were considering charging him with weapons violations and cruelty to children, District Attorney Richard Read said.

None of the victims' wounds was considered life-threatening.

The girlfriend who had broken up with the gunman was not among the wounded.

Heritage High, 20 miles from Atlanta, is a mostly White suburban school, like Columbine High in Littleton. About 80 percent of the graduates go on to college.

After the Columbine High School rampage in which two White students shot and killed 12 students, a teacher and then themselves, Heritage officials had sent letters to parents of the 1,300 students to assure them that a similar attack was unlikely at their school.

The Solomon family moved two years ago to the Atlanta suburb from Kernersville, NC. The boy's mother, Mae Dean Daniels, works as a secretary for a veterinarian. His stepfather, Robert Daniels, is a trucking executive.

A friend of the suspect told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution that Solomon recently received a handgun as a gift from his parents, but they took it away when they learned he was carrying the gun around.

Another friend of the suspect said there were "lots of guns" in the basement of the family's home.

"The guns were in this fancy display case, like a wood and glass armoire," Skip Morgan, 16, told the New York Times.

"There had to be a dozen, maybe 15 rifles, really nice ones that his stepdad collected. And the bullets were in this drawer right underneath."