Georgia school shooting suspect was troubled by broken family, father says in earlier investigation

(AP) – It had been just the two of them, the teenager and his father, since a deportation a year earlier ended with the boy’s parents separating and fracturing the entire family.

That’s what Colin Gray told a Georgia sheriff’s investigator who knocked on his door in May 2023 to ask whether an online threat to commit a school shooting had been posted by his son, Colt.

“I don’t know anything about him saying (an insult) like that,” Gray told Jackson County sheriff’s investigator Daniel Miller, according to a transcript of their interview obtained by The Associated Press. “I would be furious if he did, and all the guns would be gone.”

Colt, 14, and Colin Gray, 54, are now both charged with killing two students and two teachers Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta. Nine other people were injured, seven of them by gunshot wounds. The Grays made their first court appearance Friday, where their attorneys declined to immediately request bail.

The teen is charged with murder and his father is charged with second-degree murder for providing his son with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle used to kill children. Arrest warrants say Gray’s father did so knowing his son “posed a threat to himself and others.”

Jackson County authorities closed their investigation into Colt Gray a year ago, concluding there was no clear evidence linking him to a threat posted on Discord, a social network popular with video gamers. The documents from that investigation provide at least a small glimpse into a boy who struggled to come to terms with his parents’ breakup and the middle school he attended at the time, where his father said others frequently made fun of him.

“He gets upset and feels pressured. He can’t think straight,” Colin Gray told the investigator on May 21, 2023, recalling a discussion he had with the boy’s school principal.

Shooting and hunting were frequent pastimes for both father and son, he said. 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 a few months earlier, his father was filled with pride. He showed the investigator a photo on his cellphone, saying, “You see him with blood on his cheeks after he shot his first deer.”

“It was simply the best day of my life,” Colin Gray said.

The investigator’s report and the interview transcript do not mention that Gray owned an assault rifle. When asked if his son had access to firearms, the father said he did.

But he said the guns were not 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 rocked the Grays family in the summer of 2022.

On July 25 of that year, a deputy sheriff 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 crew of movers was stacking their belongings in the yard.

Four people were killed and several others were taken to hospital.

A Jackson County sheriff’s deputy said in a report that the movers found firearms and hunting bows in a closet in the master bedroom. They gave the guns and ammunition to the deputy sheriff for safekeeping, rather than leaving them outside with the family’s other belongings.

The deputy sheriff wrote that he left copies of the gun receipt forms 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 investigator in 2023 that he had paid his rent.

It was after the expulsion, he said, that his wife left him, taking his two younger siblings with her.

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

“I’m the sole service provider, I do the high-rise buildings downtown,” he told the investigator. Two days later, Colin Gray was interviewed again while he was at work. He said by phone: “I’m hanging off the top of a building. … I’ve got a big crane going up, so it’s a little noisy in here.”

Middle school had also been a difficult time for Colt Gray. He had just finished his seventh grade year when Miller interviewed the father and son.

Colin Gray said the boy had only a few friends and was often bullied, with some students “making fun of him day in and day out”.

“I don’t want him to fight anybody, but they keep pinching him and touching him,” Gray said. “Words are one thing, but when you start touching him, it’s a whole other story. And it got to the point where last week he didn’t care about his finals.”

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

He denied making any threats and said that in the past few months he had stopped using the Discord platform, where the threat against the school was posted. He then 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 teenager said.

A year before they were both charged in the high school shooting, Colin Gray insisted to a sheriff’s investigator that his son was not the type to threaten violence.

“He’s not a loner, Officer Miller. Don’t let that fool you,” 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 writer Trenton Daniel in New York contributed to this report.