The Associated Press
Monday, Feb. 28, 2000; 9:20 p.m. EST

ATLANTA –– A suburban Atlanta teen-ager accused of shooting six classmates in the halls of his high school last spring apologized in a letter released Monday and said he wished he "could take every minute of it back."

Portions of the letter from T.J. Solomon, 16, were read during a televised interview with his parents. It was the first time they had spoken publicly about their son's arrest and the shootings that wounded six students at Heritage High School.

"Sometimes it feels lonely to be in here," the teen-ager wrote from the jail where he is awaiting trial as an adult. "If I could undo what I did to get in here, I would. I am truly sorry for what I did last year and wish that I could take every minute of it back."

Solomon summarized his emotions in the days before the May 20 attack.

"It is hard to describe how dark and isolated I felt leading to the date of my mistake," Solomon wrote. "It almost made everything in my life not worth waiting for.

"I always thought to myself that if I could put everything I was feeling away, somewhere inside of me, that I would be fine until my emotions were too much for me to bear."

Solomon's mother, Mae Dean Daniele, told Atlanta's WSB-TV it's "hard to think that your child can reach this type of a point in his life when it is so meaningless to him. ... I had no idea on May 20 that my child was that ill.

"I watched him walk to the school bus, and I thought we had the perfect life."

She said she was at work when she heard about the shootings and went home, where the district attorney called her.

"He said he had T.J. and explained what T.J. had done. I couldn't believe my son could do this. The whole life I knew didn't exist," Daniele said.

Solomon's attorneys have argued that the teen-ager belongs in a mental institution, but the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled that he was not out of touch with reality at the time of the shootings.

During an August hearing to decide whether Solomon should be tried as an adult, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation described a note found under Solomon's bed that made references to the Columbine High School massacre and in which Solomon apparently wrote that he had been planning the attack for years.

A state-appointed psychologist also testified at the hearing that Solomon told him six days after the shooting that he didn't want to kill anyone and "just wanted to cause a big panic."

If convicted on all counts, Solomon could be sentenced to more than 350 years in prison. A trial date has not been set.