Georgia school shooting suspect was troubled by a broken family, taunting at school, his father said

There were two of them, the teenager and his father, as the boy’s parents had been kicked out of the house a year earlier and the divorce had torn the entire family apart.

That’s what Colin Gray told a Georgia sheriff’s detective who came to his door in May 2023 to ask if his son Colt had posted an online threat to commit a school shooting.

“I don’t know if he said (expletive) anything like that,” Gray told Jackson County sheriff’s investigator Daniel Miller, according to a transcript of their interview obtained by The Associated Press. “I get mad when he does that, and then all the guns are gone.”

Now both Colt, 14, and Colin Gray, 54, are facing charges in the murder of two students and two teachers Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta. Nine others were wounded, seven of them shot. The Grays appeared before the first time in courtwhere their lawyers refused to immediately apply for bail.

The teenager is accused of murder, and his father is accused of second degree murder for giving his son a semi-automatic AR-15-style rifle, which is used to kill children. Arrest warrants say the elder Gray did so knowing his son “was a threat to himself and others.”

Jackson County authorities closed their investigation into Colt Gray a year ago, concluding there was no compelling evidence to link him to a threat posted on Discord, a social media site popular with video gamers. The evidence from that investigation offers at least a limited window into a boy struggling with his parents’ breakup and the high school he attended at the time, where his father said others often teased him.

“He gets frustrated and stressed. He’s not really thinking clearly,” Colin Gray told the investigator on May 21, 2023, recalling a conversation he had with the boy’s principal.

He said shooting guns and hunting were common pastimes for father and son. Gray said he encouraged 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 detective a photo on his cell phone and said, “You can see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer.”

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

There is no mention in the investigative report or interview transcript that Gray owns an assault rifle. When asked if his son had access to firearms, the father said yes.

However, he said the guns were not loaded and stressed that he had emphasized safety when teaching the boy to shoot.

“He knows how serious guns are and what they can do,” Gray said, “and how to use them and how not to use them.”

An eviction in the summer of 2022 caused great unrest in the Grays family.

On July 25 of that year, a sheriff’s deputy was dispatched to the rental house 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 sheriff’s deputy said in a report that movers found rifles and hunting bows in a closet in the master bedroom. They gave the weapons and ammunition to the sheriff’s deputy for safekeeping, rather than leaving them outside with the family’s other belongings.

The officer wrote that he had left copies of receipts for the guns on the front door so Gray could pick them up later at the sheriff’s office.

The reason for the eviction is not mentioned in the report. Colin Gray told the researcher in 2023 that he had paid his rent.

He said that after the deportation, his wife left him and took her two younger siblings with her.

Colt Gray “had a hard time with the divorce and everything at first,” said the father, who worked in construction.

“I’m the only operator, I do high-rise downtown,” he told the investigator. Two days later, there was a follow-up interview with Colin Gray while he was at work. He said over the phone, “I’m on top of a building. … I have a big crane going, so it’s pretty noisy in here.”

High school was also tough for Colt Gray. He had just finished seventh grade when Miller interviewed the father and son.

Colin Gray said the boy had few friends and was often bullied. Some students “just made fun of him, day in and day out.”

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

The investigator also interviewed the boy, then 13 years old. The report described him as quiet, calm and reserved.

He denied making the threats and said he had stopped using the Discord platform where the school threat was posted months earlier. He later told his father that 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 were both charged in the high school shooting, Colin Gray insisted to a sheriff’s detective that his son was not the type to threaten violence.

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

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Associated Press reporter Trenton Daniel in New York contributed to this report.