Crime
Two students look at a memorial as flags are flown at half-staff following a shooting Wednesday at Apalachee High School, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024, in Winder, Georgia. AP Photo/Mike Stewart
WINDER, Ga. (AP) — The teenager accused of opening fire at a Georgia high school denied threatening to shoot up the school when authorities questioned him last year about a threatening social media post, according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday. Meanwhile, his father has been arrested on various charges, including second-degree murder.
A list of massacres committed in the United States this year
Colin Gray, 54, Colt Gray’s father, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a social media post. No other details were immediately provided. A news conference was scheduled for later Thursday.
Authorities have charged Colt Gray, 14, as an adult with murder in the shooting Wednesday at Apalachee High School near Atlanta. Arrest warrants obtained by the AP accuse him of using a semi-automatic assault rifle in the attack, which killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine others.
Conflicting evidence about the message’s origin prevented investigators from arresting anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and found nothing that would have warranted charges at the time.
“We didn’t give up at all,” Mangum told The Associated Press in an interview. “We did everything we could with the resources we had at the time.”
When a sheriff’s investigator in neighboring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy had struggled to come to terms with his parents’ separation and was often bullied at school. The teen frequently shot guns and hunted with his father, who photographed him with deer blood on his cheeks.
“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,” the father, Colin Gray, said, according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff’s office.
The teen was questioned after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Gray, then 13, “may have threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social network popular with video gamers, according to the sheriff’s office incident report.
According to the report, the FBI’s information indicated that a Discord account was associated with an email address linked to Colt Gray. But the boy said he “would never say something like that, even in jest,” according to the investigator’s report.
The interview transcript quotes the teenager as saying, “I promise I’ll never say anything that…”, with the remainder of that denial marked inaudible.
The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” about the Discord account, which contained Russian profile information and a trail of digital evidence indicating it had been accessed in different cities in Georgia as well as Buffalo, New York.
The attack is the latest in a string of dozens of school shootings in the United States in recent years, including particularly deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut, Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas. Such classroom killings have sparked fierce debates over gun control and strained parents whose children grow up accustomed to target practice. But the nation’s gun laws have hardly changed.
Classes were canceled Thursday at the Georgia high school, though some people came to lay flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with their heads bowed.
When the suspect escaped from math class on Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath thought her quiet, recently transferred classmate was skipping class again. But he returned later and tried to go back into the room. Some students tried to open the locked door but instead walked away.
“I guess they saw something, but for some reason they didn’t open the door,” Sayarath said.
The teenager then opened fire in the hallway, authorities said.
Sayarath said he heard a burst of 10 to 15 gunshots. The students fell to the ground and crawled around looking for a safe place to hide.
Two school protective services officers confronted the shooter minutes after the shots were reported, Hosey said. The teen immediately surrendered.
Gray was being held Thursday at an area youth detention center. His first court appearance was scheduled for Friday morning.
He was charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey.
At least nine other people, eight students and a teacher from Winder School, were injured and taken to hospitals. All are expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.
Authorities have not provided a motive or explained how the suspect obtained the weapon and brought it into the school of about 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of Atlanta’s ever-expanding urban sprawl.
It was the 30th mass shooting in the United States this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 people have died in the killings, defined as events in which four or more people die in a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.
Previous cases have been reported in which a person who was once on the FBI’s radar but was not arrested later committed violence.
A month before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, the FBI received a tip that he had talked about committing a mass shooting. The FBI also investigated a tip about the person who was later convicted in a deadly 2022 shooting at a Colorado gay nightclub.
The trend underscores the challenges law enforcement faces when trying to determine whether concerning behavior constitutes a crime. Investigators sift through tens of thousands of tips each year to try to determine which ones might pose a viable threat. Cases like the Georgia school shooting raise new questions about whether more investigative work could have prevented the violence.
The sheriff’s report states that Investigator Daniel Miller spoke to the boy and his father on May 21, 2023. The father said his son had access to firearms in the home.
“I mean they’re not loaded, but they’re broken down,” Gray’s father said, according to the interview transcript.
He described a cellphone photo taken during a recent hunting trip with his son: “You see him with blood on his cheeks after he shot his first deer.” Gray’s father called it “the best day of his life.”
The teen told Miller he had stopped using Discord a few months earlier after his account was hacked.
“I have to take your word for it and I hope you’re honest with me,” Miller replied.
A phone number associated with the account was linked to another person in another Georgia city, the report said. The account’s profile name, written in Russian, translates to Lanza. The investigator noted that Adam Lanza was the perpetrator of the 2012 mass shooting that killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
The sheriff’s office alerted local schools to continue monitoring the teen. But the investigator concluded that he “could not substantiate the information I received from the FBI to take further action.”
Martin reported from Atlanta. Associated Press reporters Charlotte Kramon, Sharon Johnson, Mike Stewart and Erik Verduzco in Winder; Trenton Daniel and Beatrice Dupuy in New York; Eric Tucker in Washington; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Kate Brumback in Atlanta; and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed reporting.
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