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Father says Ga. shooting suspect suffers from broken family and teasing at school

Russ Bynum
| Associated Press

It was just the two of them, the teenager and his father, because a year earlier there had been an eviction in which the boy's parents had separated, leading to a breakup that tore the whole family apart.

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

“I don't know if he said anything like that,” Gray told Jackson County Sheriff's Investigator Daniel Miller, according to a transcript of their interview obtained by The Associated Press. “If he did that, I'm going to be mad as hell, and then all the guns are going to go.”

Now both 14-year-old Colt and 54-year-old Colin Gray are accused of killing two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta, on Wednesday. Nine other people were injured, seven of them shot. The Grays made their first court appearance on Friday, where their lawyers declined to immediately request bail.

The teenager is charged with murder, and his father is charged with first-degree murder for providing his son with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that he could use to kill children. The warrants say the elder Gray did this because he knew his son “posed a threat to himself and others.”

Jackson County authorities ended their investigation of Colt Gray a year ago, concluding that there was no hard evidence linking him to a threat posted on Discord, a social media site popular with video gamers. The records of that investigation provide at least a small glimpse into the life of a boy struggling with his parents' separation and the middle school he attended at the time, where his father said others frequently taunted him.

“He gets nervous and under pressure. He can't think clearly anymore,” Colin Gray told the investigator on May 21, 2023, recalling a discussion he had with the boy's school principal.

He said shooting and hunting are common pastimes for father and son. Gray said he encourages 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 ago, his father was overjoyed. He showed the investigator a photo on his cell phone and said, “You see him with blood on his cheeks because he shot his first deer.”

“It was simply the greatest day ever,” said Colin Gray.

The investigator's report and the interrogation transcript do not mention that either of the Grays owned an assault rifle. When asked if his son had access to firearms, the father answered yes.

However, he said the weapons were not loaded and stressed that he had placed great emphasis on safety when giving the boy shooting lessons.

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

In the summer of 2022, the Gray family is thrown off balance by an eviction.

On July 25 of that year, a deputy sheriff was dispatched to the suburban cul-de-sac apartment building where Colin Gray, his wife, Colt, and the boy's two younger siblings lived. A moving crew was piling up their belongings in the yard.

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

The deputy wrote that he left copies of the gun receipts on the front door so Gray could pick them up later from 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.

After the eviction, his wife left him and took his two younger siblings with her, he said.

Colt Gray “struggled with the separation and everything at first,” said his father, who worked in construction.

“I'm the only contractor and I work on high-rises downtown,” he told the investigator. Two days later, there was a follow-up interview with Colin Gray while he was at work. On the phone, he said, “I'm hanging on top of a building. … I have a big crane going, so it's pretty loud up here.”

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

Colin Gray said the boy had few friends and was often teased, with some pupils “taunting him day in and day out”.

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

The investigator also questioned the boy, who was 13 at the time and was described in a report as quiet, calm and reserved.

He denied making any threats and said he had stopped using the Discord platform where the threat against the school was posted months earlier. He later told his father his account had been hacked.

“The only thing I have is TikTok, but I just go there and watch videos,” the teenager said.

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

“He's not a loner, Officer Miller. You can't understand that,” 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.

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