First court appearance set for Georgia teen accused of killing four people at his high school

WINDER, Ga. — The 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at a Georgia high school was expected to make his first court appearance Friday, a day after his father was also arrested for allowing his son to possess a gun.

Colt Gray, charged as an adult with four counts of murder, will appear by video from a juvenile detention center for the proceedings at the Barrow County Courthouse. The hearing will be held two days after authorities said the teen opened fire at Apalachee High School in Winder, outside Atlanta.

The teen’s father, Colin Gray, 54, was charged Thursday with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said.

“The charges against him are directly related to his son’s actions and allowing him to possess a gun,” Hosey said. A date for Colin Gray’s first court appearance has not yet been set.

According to Hosey, father and son were charged with the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. Nine other people were injured, seven of them by gunfire.

It is the latest example of prosecutors holding parents accountable for their children’s actions in school shootings. In April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first people convicted of a mass shooting at a U.S. school. They were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for not keeping a firearm at home and acting indifferently to signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health before he killed four students in 2021.

Arrest warrants obtained by the AP accuse Colt Gray of using a semi-automatic assault rifle in the attack. Authorities have not offered a motive or explained how he obtained the weapon and brought it into the school.

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.

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 about gun control, but national gun laws have remained largely unchanged.

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).