Friends of Richard Aspinwall, one of the two teachers killed in the shooting at Georgia’s Apalachee High School, gave emotional interviews Thursday describing the math teacher and football coach’s character.
Nick Bach, who had known Aspinwall for more than a decade and who coached football with him, described to CNN’s Erin Burnett what he was thinking after he reached out to check in on his friend via text on Wednesday morning.
“Honestly, at that moment, I thought the odds had to be super-low. It can’t possibly be him. There are probably 2,000 kids, a thousand other people walking around that building, you know. We’re down to one-in-3,000, but that’s still crazy odds. There’s no way,” he said.
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“And then maybe 20, 30 minutes later I started getting a few texts from fellow coaches that we all work together. We were all really close, and a couple of guys started saying that they were hearing that maybe it was him and then I just started shaking and kind of speechless and didn’t know what to do for a few hours—mixed messages coming in at that point.
When Burnett informed Bach of how the gunman allegedly made threats at another school, prompting an investigation, and how his father still went on to gift him the gun he used in school, Bach said it was difficult to fathom.
“I’m honestly not able to process too much of it. Certainly infuriating a little bit. Kind of makes my stomach turn,” he said. “At the same time, I just heard it a few seconds ago and I’m just really here to honor my friend and how great he was.”
The gunman’s father, Colin Gray, was arrested late Thursday. He is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children.
Bach, who was also at Aspinwall’s wedding, went on to describe him as “the best.”
“The most beautiful soul you’ve ever met who would go so far above and beyond for everybody around him,” he said. “For the students in his math classes, for teachers in his department, coaches—I mean, you never had to ask him to do anything. He just did it because he just wanted everybody around him to be great. And I think that was his calling. It was just in his DNA to help everybody around him, so he was just so good at that. He just made us all admire and love them. So that’s why we’re all so broken up right now.”
In the next hour on AC360, Matt Tanner, another friend of Aspinwall’s who had known him since middle school, similarly described him as “like a brother to me,” emphasized by how each was the other’s best man at their weddings
“He always had a smile on his face. He had a laugh that was contagious,” Tanner said. “He was just awesome.”
“Family was really big for him,” he said of Aspinwall, who had a wife and two daughters. “And you know that most folks always want to find a way to leave it better than you found it and do better than was done for you, and he really took that to heart. He played with the Barbies, he’d do the hair, he’d sip the teacups, he was on the floor. He was a very present, involved father. He was a superhero to those girls.”
