He was 16, bullied at school and living with his grandparents in a home stocked with firearms. Classmates called him “the next school shooter” and taunted him that he was going to be a drug addict like his parents.

Finally, one winter morning on the school bus, he turned on his tormentors. Curling his fingers in the shape of a pistol, he said, “I hope you all die.”

It was a situation that has become grimly familiar in recent years: an alienated young man with a festering grievance and access to guns. Too often, it has ended in horrifying bloodshed.

But what happened next, in this small community in central New York, upended decades of thinking about how to prevent mass shootings.

Threat Level: High

In May 2022, after a gunman killed 10 people at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered each of the state’s 62 counties to create plans to stop the next threat before it ended in more deaths.

The strategy, developed by the Secret Service, begins with the understanding that mass shooters do not just one day “snap,” but build up to the act. They leave warning signs and are often even questioned by the police but then ignored because they have not committed crimes.

The approach aims to intervene during the buildup, using mental health services and other agencies, teamed with law enforcement, to get people off the pathway to violence early — into counseling, drug rehab or other support networks.

“Thoughts and prayers aren’t enough,” said Jackie Bray, commissioner of the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, which trains and pays for the county teams. “Mitigating these things — security cameras, security guards, school drills — isn’t enough. You have to act to prevent them, because they’re happening at an ever-increasing clip. And if we prevent some, that saves lives.”

In Madison County, a rural region east of Syracuse, the threat on the school bus that morning in February 2023 became the first challenge for a newly formed team.

Madison County is a low-density sprawl of rolling hills and farmland. The sheriff’s office is a squat cinder block building abutting the county jail.

Here, Sgt. Krystyna Feola, a 13-year veteran from a family of cops, works out of a windowless office so narrow that a tall person could touch the walls on both sides.

When she got the call that day about the threat on the school bus, she went through a quick mental checklist. The student who made the threat had a record of angry blowups. He had access to weapons, exposure to violence, a troubled family history, and high levels of depression and suicidal thinking. (The student’s case file is protected under federal privacy laws. The New York Times was allowed to view it, with names redacted, on the condition that it not publish the student’s name or identifying details.)

That day, Sergeant Feola went to the student’s home and made sure his grandfather’s firearms — five long guns used for hunting — were locked up. She provided trigger locks for those that did not have them. The school searched the student’s backpack and locker. No guns.

In years past, this would have been as far as the sheriff’s office went. The student said he did not really intend to harm his classmates, but was just “pissed off and sick and tired of being picked on.” He was a problem, maybe, but he had not broken the law. Sergeant Feola would have let the case go.

“That’s the only training I had,” she said.

But now the sergeant, working with a counterpart in the county Office of Emergency Management, had a whole range of resources to call on. They had spent the previous months assembling a team of teachers, coaches, clergy and other community members, along with law enforcement and agencies providing social services and mental health care — in all, 106 people from 59 organizations. It was their job to decide whether the threat was real or just talk, and to coordinate a response.

On Feb. 28, two weeks after the incident on the bus, the group held its third monthly meeting. In the room were 21 team members, with another 15 joining remotely.

Everyone agreed that the student posed a high risk to himself and his schoolmates. The question was what to do about it.

For law enforcement, the safest course, at least in the short run, would have been to remove him from the school. But others on the team brought different objectives.

“We have a responsibility to develop good human beings that are going to be in society,” said Corey Graves, the school superintendent, who was on the team. “Taking a student that has troubles and just saying, ‘Not my problem’ — that just passes the problem on to society as a whole.”

Instead, Mr. Graves said, the team considered a range of responses. “We try to figure out what the root cause of the issue is,” he said. “It could be food insecurity. It could be housing issues.”

Sergeant Feola had already taken the first step, to secure the guns — a normal task for law enforcement. The next step was something new: take on the bullying.

The school serves about 400 students in grades pre-K through 12, with half qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. Everyone knows everyone else, sometimes too well. The school suspended the student, then offered him the option to attend classes remotely, with tutoring, while the administration dealt with the students who were bullying him.

“He absolutely hated to go to school because he knew what was coming,” the student’s grandmother said, adding that the school did little to stop it, instead punishing her grandson when he reacted.

Mike Carinci, the school resource officer — a member of the sheriff’s office who worked in the school — viewed and listened to hours of video from the bus, seeing the level of abuse directed daily at the student. “Just horrible things, like nonstop,” he said.

Mr. Carinci summoned the students and told them that the bullying had to end. The superintendent told them that they could be suspended or expelled.

Mr. Carinci gradually became the student’s ally within the school, the person whose office he went to when he felt like blowing up. “After everything that was going on on the bus,” the grandmother said, “Mike just brought it all to a head.”

With the student separated from classmates and receiving tutoring and counseling, he was raising his grades and his behavior was improving, his grandmother said. The team reassessed his threat as moderate, which reduced the monitoring.

But in April, as he planned to return to school, a rumor spread that he had a list of classmates he intended to kill. Parents urged the school not to let him return. The student, in turn, was agitated that classmates were still talking about him, even in his absence.

Again, the threat team had work to do, not just on the student, but also on his classmates and their parents. The school traced the “hit list” rumor to a girl who admitted making it up. This quieted the community.

With all the attention — from Sergeant Feola, Mr. Carinci and various counselors and therapists — the student managed to complete his junior year. He still had outbursts at home, but his grandmother said she had not had to call the police, as she had in the past. Several of the students who bullied him apologized.

At What Cost?

Did Sergeant Feola’s team actually prevent a mass shooting?

It’s a question that cannot be answered, said Ben Voce-Gardner, director of counterterrorism at the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.

“That’s the point of the whole program,” Mr. Voce-Gardner said. “We’re trying to get there early, so it will be difficult for us to ever get to a point where we can tell you definitively, ‘We stopped a mass attack.’”

He said the teams were still valuable because they provide resources to people who need them. “Whether it’s counseling. Whether it’s addiction treatment, whether it’s domestic violence prevention counseling, you name it.”

Commissioner Bray, who came to the job with a background in public health rather than law enforcement, conceded that there were no definitive, long-term studies showing that the programs reduce mass shootings. But there is evidence that mass shooters tend to follow a common path to violence, that they leave signals of their intentions, and that threat-assessment programs can respond to those signals.

The state is now inviting researchers to study its program, she added.

She acknowledged a simpler way to reduce mass shootings. “Gun legislation would absolutely reduce these incidents, and we absolutely need it, full stop,” she said. “We’re all-in on stronger gun legislation here in counterterrorism land.”

Civil liberties groups say threat assessment programs gather intrusive volumes of data on people who have committed no crime, with little outside oversight, and that they disproportionately target people of color and those with mental illness.

“We are left to wonder and worry how they target, collect, or protect New Yorkers’ private data,” said Beth Haroules, director of disability justice litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union. Once a person has been deemed a threat, she said, he or she could be forced into psychiatric evaluation by people who are not mental health professionals.

There are also holes in the system. For example, Texas and Utah both have threat assessment programs comparable to New York’s. But they did not stop the targeted shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas or the killing of Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah.

“Everyone Thinks We’re Arrest-Happy”

In Madison County, since the start of the program in December 2022, Sergeant Feola and her team have evaluated 135 threats. Most of these they dismissed or directed to social service agencies.

No referral has led to an arrest, and the county has not had a targeted attack in the time the team has been operating.

Sergeant Feola considered both of these to be measures of success. “I know people are hesitant to get law enforcement involved in things, because everyone thinks, like, we’re arrest-happy,” she said. “But that’s the opposite of what the goal of this team is, and the fact that we haven’t arrested anybody is a case of that.”

She said one unexpected result of the program was that agencies on the team have been working more closely together since its formation, often in cases unrelated to violence.

“I can’t believe we just started this a couple years ago,” she said. “I feel like we should have been doing this forever.”

Two and a half years after the student’s threat on the school bus, he is still under observation. She said there were no fixed criteria for when to end a case.

For the family, the intervention was sometimes overwhelming.

“It got to be too much after a while,” his grandmother said. “Because he was on high alert all the time — what’s going to be said today, or what’s going to happen today or if the police are going to show up at the house, which they did a few times after he made a few comments.”

She did not think him capable of seriously hurting others.

Yet overall, she said, the experience has been positive, and that without the intervention the outcome might have been much worse. “To be honest, I was scared at some points of him trying to commit suicide,” she said. “That’s how bad things were.”

Instead, he stayed in school and managed to graduate the following year.

Sergeant Feola still checks in with him regularly, most recently offering advice on how to manage an aggressive dog.

At one point during his senior year, he even asked to meet her team to thank them.

“He thanked us for caring about him,” the sergeant said. “Because he felt like no one ever took the time to really care, and he could tell that we cared. It was really nice to hear.”

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.