Mother of Georgia attacker called school to warn of emergency, aunt says

The mother of the 14-year-old charged with murder in the fatal shooting of four people at his Georgia high school called the school before the killings and warned staff of an “extreme emergency” regarding her son, a relative said.

Annie Brown told the Washington Post that her sister, the mother of the suspected shooter, sent her a text message saying she had spoken to a school counselor and asked him to find and check on her son “immediately.”

Brown provided screenshots of the text exchange to the newspaper, which also reported that a call log on the family's shared phone plan showed a call was made to the school about 30 minutes before the shooting allegedly broke out.

Brown confirmed the reporting to The Associated Press in a text message on Saturday but declined to comment further.

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The 14-year-old boy has been charged with murder for killing two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta, on Wednesday. His father, Colin Gray, is charged with first-degree murder for giving his son an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Her lawyers declined to immediately request bail at her first court appearance on Friday.

The investigators previously questioned the suspects

The Georgia teenager was struggling with his parents' separation and teasing from classmates, his father told a sheriff's investigator last year when asked if his son had posted an online threat.

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

Jackson County authorities ended their investigation into the teenager a year ago, concluding 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.

Father says his son was bullied at school

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

Middle school was also tough for the boy. He had just finished seventh grade when Miller interviewed father and son. Colin Gray said the boy had few friends and was often teased. Some students “taunted 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.”

Shooting and hunting, he said, were frequent 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 he killed a deer months earlier, his father was filled with pride. He showed the investigator a photo on his 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 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 emphasized that he had placed great emphasis on safety during the boy's shooting lessons.

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

Family displaced in 2022

An eviction threw the Gray family into disarray in the summer of 2022. On July 25 of that year, a deputy sheriff was dispatched to the suburban cul-de-sac rental home where Colin Gray, his wife, their teenager, and his 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 receipts for the guns at 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, he said, his wife left him and took his two younger siblings with her. The boy “had a hard time dealing with the separation and everything at first,” said his father, who worked in construction.

“I'm the only contractor and I build 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.”

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Boy described as quiet

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 don't understand,” the father said, adding, “He just wants to go to school, do his own thing, and he doesn't want to get in trouble.”