Father of Georgia school massacre suspect arrested, charges include 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 several charges, including second-degree murder, authorities said Thursday.

Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, was charged with four counts of manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of child abuse, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a social media post. Further details were not immediately released, but a news conference was planned for later in the day.

In Georgia, second-degree murder means that a person caused the death of another person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. The penalty for this is 10 to 30 years in prison, while premeditated murder and intentional homicide carry a minimum sentence of life in prison.

Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with murder in the attack that took place Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta. Arrest warrants obtained by the AP accuse him of using a semi-automatic assault rifle in the attack that killed two students and two teachers and injured nine others.

A sheriff's report obtained Thursday shows the teenager denied threatening to carry out a school shooting last year when authorities questioned him about a threatening social media post.

Due to conflicting evidence about the origin of the post, investigators were unable to arrest 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 fail here at all,” Mangum said in an interview with the Associated Press. “We did everything we could with what we had at the time.”

When a sheriff's investigator from 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 teenager frequently fired guns and went hunting with his father, who photographed him with deer blood on his cheeks.

“He knows how dangerous guns are, what they can do and how to use them and how not to use them,” Colin Gray said, according to a transcript from the sheriff's office.

The teen was questioned after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Colt Gray, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular among video gamers, according to the sheriff's office incident report.

The FBI's tip pointed to a Discord account linked to an email address associated with Colt Gray, the report said. But the boy said “he would never say something like that, not even in jest,” the investigator's report said.

In the transcript of the interview, the teenager is quoted as saying, “I promise I would never say anything where…”, with the rest of this denial reported as inaudible.

The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” about the Discord account. The account contained profile information in Russian and a digital trail of evidence indicated that the account had been accessed in various cities in the US state of Georgia as well as in Buffalo, New York.

The attack was the latest in a series of dozens 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 and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up practicing school shootings. But little has changed in national gun laws.

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

When the suspect sneaked out of math class on Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath assumed her quiet classmate, who had recently changed schools, was skipping school again. But he later returned and tried to go back into the classroom. Some students tried to open the locked door, but backed away instead.

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

The teenager then opened fire in the hallway, authorities said.

Sayarath said she heard a volley of 10 to 15 shots. Students fell to the ground and crawled away in search of a safe place to hide.

Two school security officers confronted the shooter minutes after the shooting was reported, Hosey said. The teenager immediately surrendered.

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

According to Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, he was charged with the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo (both 14), as well as teachers Richard Aspinwall (39) and Christina Irimie (53).

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

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

According to a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in collaboration with Northeastern University, it was the 30th mass murder in the United States this year. At least 127 people died in these killings, which are defined as events in which four or more people die within 24 hours, not including the killer – the same definition used by the FBI.

Cases have already emerged where someone who was once on the FBI's radar but was not arrested later committed violent acts.

A month before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, the FBI received a warning that he had talked about committing mass murder. The FBI also followed up on a lead on the person later convicted of a fatal 2022 shooting at a gay club in Colorado.

This pattern underscores the challenges law enforcement faces in determining when worrisome behavior turns into a crime. Investigators sift through tens of thousands of tips each year to determine which ones might pose a serious threat. Cases like the Georgia school shooting raise new questions about whether more intensive investigative work could have prevented the violence.

The sheriff's report states that Investigator Daniel Miller spoke with the boy and his father on May 21, 2023. The father said his son had access to weapons in the house.

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

He captioned a photo on his phone from a recent hunting trip with his son: “You can see him with blood on his cheeks because he shot his first deer.” Gray's father called it “the greatest day ever.”

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

“I have to take you at your word and hope you are honest with me,” Miller replied.

A phone number linked to the account was linked to another person in another Georgia city, the report said. The account's profile name, written in Russian, translated to Lanza. The investigator determined that Adam Lanza was the perpetrator of the 2012 mass murder in which 26 people were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The sheriff's office asked local schools to continue monitoring the teenager, but the investigator concluded that he “could not confirm 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 to 26, not 20.

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.