School shooting suspect faced family issues, bullying, father said

Flowers are piled on a makeshift memorial by a wall.

By Russ Bynum and Claire Rush

Sept. 7, 2024 Updated 8:52 PM PT

The mother of the 14-year-old who has been charged with murder over the fatal shooting of four people at his Georgia high school called the school before the killings, warning staff of an “extreme emergency” involving her son, a relative said.

Annie Brown told the Washington Post that her sister, Colt Gray’s mother, texted her saying she spoke with a school counselor and urged them to “immediately” find her son to check on him.

Brown provided screenshots of the text exchange to the newspaper, which also reported that a call log from the family’s shared phone plan showed a call was made to the school about 30 minutes before gunfire is believed to have erupted Wednesday.

Brown confirmed the reporting to the Associated Press on Saturday in text messages but declined to provide further comment.

Her nephew has been charged with murder in the killing of two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta. Nine others were wounded. His father, Colin Gray, is accused of second-degree murder for allegedly providing his son with a semiautomatic AR-15-style rifle.

Their attorneys declined to immediately seek bail during their first court appearance Friday.

The Georgia teenager had struggled with his parents’ separation and taunting by classmates, his father told a sheriff’s investigator last year when asked whether his son had posted an online threat.

“I don’t know anything about him saying [things] like that,” Colin Gray told Jackson County sheriff’s investigator Daniel Miller, according to a transcript of their interview obtained by the AP. “I’m going to be mad as hell if he did, and then all the guns will go away.”

Jackson County authorities ended their inquiry into Colt Gray a year ago, concluding that there wasn’t clear evidence to link him to a threat posted on Discord, a social media site popular with video gamers.

“He gets flustered and under pressure. He doesn’t really think straight,” Colin Gray told the investigator on May 21, 2023, recalling a discussion he’d had with the boy’s principal.

Shooting guns and hunting, he said, were frequent pastimes for father and son. Gray said he was encouraging the boy to be more active outdoors and spend less time playing video games on his Xbox.

When Colt Gray killed a deer months earlier, his father swelled with pride. He showed the investigator a photo on his cellphone, saying: “You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer.”

“It was just the greatest day ever,” Colin Gray said.

There’s no mention in the investigator’s report and interview transcript of either Gray owning an assault-style rifle. Asked whether his son had access to firearms, the father said yes.

But he said the guns weren’t kept loaded and insisted he had emphasized safety when teaching the boy to shoot.

“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do,” Gray said, “and how to use them and not use them.”

An eviction upended the Grays’ family in summer 2022.

On July 25 of that year, a sheriff’s deputy was dispatched to the rental home on a suburban cul-de-sac where Colin Gray, his wife, Colt and the boy’s two younger siblings lived. A moving crew was piling their belongings in the yard.

The Jackson County deputy said in a report that the movers found guns and hunting bows in a closet in the master bedroom. They turned the weapons and ammunition over to the deputy for safekeeping rather than leave them outside with the family’s other possessions.

The deputy wrote that he‘d left copies of receipt forms for the weapons on the front door so that Gray could pick them up later at the sheriff’s office.

The reason for eviction is not mentioned in the report. Colin Gray told the investigator in 2023 that he had paid his rent. It was following the eviction, he said, that his wife left him, taking the two younger siblings.

Colt Gray “struggled at first with the separation and all,” said the father, who worked a construction job.

“I’m the sole provider, doing high-rises downtown,” he told the investigator. Two days later, there was a follow-up interview with Colin Gray while he was at work. He said by phone: “I’m hanging off the top of a building. ... I’ve got a big crane lift going, so it’s kind of noisy up here.”

Middle school had also been rough for Colt Gray. He had just finished the seventh grade when Miller interviewed the father and son.

Colin Gray said the boy had just a few friends and frequently got picked on. Some students “just ridiculed him day after day after day.”

“I don’t want him to fight anybody, but they just keep like pinching him and touching him,” Gray said. “Words are one thing, but you start touching him and that’s a whole different deal. And it’s just escalated to the point where like his finals were last week and that was the last thing on his mind.”

The investigator also interviewed the boy, then 13, who was described in a report as quiet, calm and reserved.

He denied making any threats and said that months earlier he’d stopped using the Discord platform, where the school threat was posted. He later told his father his account had been hacked. “The only thing I have is TikTok, but I just go on there and watch videos,” the teen said.

A year before they would both end up charged in the high school shooting, Colin Gray insisted to the sheriff’s investigator that his son wasn’t the type to threaten violence.

“He’s not a loner, Officer Miller. Don’t get that,” the father said, adding: “He just wants to go to school, do his own thing and he doesn’t want any trouble.”

Bynum and Rush write for the Associated Press. AP writer Trenton Daniel in New York contributed to this report.