Father of Georgia school shooting suspect arrested on charges including second-degree murder

WINDER, Georgia. – The father of the teenager accused of opening fire at a Georgia high school, killing four people and wounding nine, has been arrested on multiple charges, including second-degree murder, authorities said Thursday.

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.

“These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a gun,” GBI Director Chris Hosey said at an afternoon news conference. “His charges are directly related to his son’s actions and allowing him to possess a gun.”

In Georgia, second-degree murder means that a person has caused the death of another person by committing second-degree cruelty against children, regardless of intent. It is punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison, while willful murder and felony murder carry a minimum sentence of life in prison. Involuntary manslaughter means that someone unintentionally causes the death of another person.

Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with murder in Wednesday’s shooting at Apalachee High School outside 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.

The teen denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when authorities interviewed him last year about a threatening social media post, according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday.

According to the report, conflicting evidence about the post’s origin left investigators unable to make any arrests. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and found nothing to warrant filing charges at the time.

“We have not failed at all in this matter,” Mangum told The Associated Press in an interview. “We did everything we could with what 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 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 severity of guns and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,” Colin Gray said, according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff’s office.

The teen was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Colt Gray, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a high school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video game players, according to the sheriff’s office incident report.

According to the report, the FBI’s lead pointed to a Discord account 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 transcript of the interview quotes the teen as saying, “I promise I would never say anything where…”, with the rest of the denial rendered inaudible.

The investigator wrote that no arrests were made due to “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a trail of digital evidence indicating it had been accessed in different cities in Georgia, as well as in Buffalo, New York.

The attack was the latest in a series of school shootings in the United States in recent years, including particularly deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have sparked heated debates over gun control and angered parents whose children grow up accustomed to active-shooter drills, but national gun laws have changed little.

Classes were canceled Thursday at the Georgia high school, though some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel on the grass with their heads bowed.

When the suspect slipped out of math class on Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath thought her quiet classmate, who had recently transferred, was skipping school again. But he returned later and wanted to re-enter the classroom. Some students went to open the locked door, but walked away instead.

“I guess they saw something, but for some reason they didn’t open the door,” Sayarath said.

The teen 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 in search of a safe corner to hide.

Two school police officers confronted the shooter minutes after the shooting was reported, Hosey said. The teen immediately turned himself in.

Gray was being held Thursday at a regional juvenile detention center. His first court appearance was scheduled for Friday morning.

He has been charged with the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, Hosey said.

At least nine other people — eight students and a teacher at Winder High School — were injured and taken to hospitals. All are expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.

Authorities have not offered a motive or explained how the suspect obtained the gun and smuggled it into the school of about 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of the ever-expanding Atlanta metropolitan area.

According to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in collaboration with Northeastern University, this is the 30th mass shooting in the United States this year. At least 127 people have died in such killings, which are defined as events in which four or more people are killed within a 24-hour period, not including the killer (the same definition used by the FBI).

There have been previous cases where someone who was once on the FBI’s radar but not arrested went on to commit acts of 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 been talking about committing a mass shooting. The FBI also investigated a tip about the person who was later convicted of a 2022 fatal shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado.

This pattern highlights the challenges law enforcement faces in trying to determine when concerning behavior becomes a crime. Investigators sift through tens of thousands of leads each year to try to determine which ones might lead to a viable threat. Cases like the Georgia school shooting raise new questions about whether more intensive investigative efforts could have prevented the violence.

The sheriff’s report says investigator Daniel Miller spoke to the boy and his father on May 21, 2023. The father said his son had access to guns in the home.

“I mean they’re not loaded, but they’re down,” Gray’s father said, according to the interview transcript.

Gray described a photo he took on his cellphone during a recent hunt with his son: “You see him with blood on his cheeks from having taken his first deer.” Gray’s father called it “the best day ever.”

The teenager told Miller he stopped using Discord a few months earlier after his account was hacked.

“I have to believe you and I hope you’re honest with me,” Miller replied.

According to the report, a phone number associated with the account was linked to a different person in another Georgia city. The account’s profile name, written in Russian, was translated as 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 corroborate the tip I received from the FBI to take further action.”

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This story corrects the death toll at Sandy Hook Elementary School to 26, not 20.

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Martin reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writers 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 to this report.