The mother of a 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at his Georgia high school this week told relatives she called the school the morning of the attack, warning of an “extreme emergency,” his sister said. Saturday.
Suspect Colt Gray opened fire Wednesday morning on the campus of Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., killing two students and two teachers and injuring nine others, authorities said. Authorities said reports of the shooting came in at 10:20 a.m., but the suspect’s mother, Marci Gray, apparently called the school at 9:50 a.m., her sister, Anne Brown, said.
It was unclear what specifically prompted the mother to call the school that morning.
The emergence of a possible warning from the suspect’s mother intensifies the scrutiny now applied to his family, school officials and law enforcement officials about missed opportunities to heed warning signs and intervene before an attack.
Ms. Gray told Ms. Brown in a text message after the shooting that she had notified a counselor at the school, Brown said. There was a school phone First reported Saturday by The Washington PostIn which Ms. Brown cited text messages and a call log from the family’s shared phone plan that documented a 10-minute phone call to the school from the mother’s number.
Ms. Brown confirmed details of the Post’s report to The New York Times on Saturday evening. And a federal law enforcement official confirmed that the mother called the school shortly before the shooting.
A spokeswoman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is handling the investigation, declined to comment Saturday. Jude Smith, the sheriff of Barrow County, Ga., where the shooting occurred, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment, nor did officials with the Barrow County school system.
The FBI said hours after the shooting that it referred a school shooting threat posted online more than a year ago to the local sheriff’s office, whose investigators tracked down the suspect, who was 13 at the time.
At that time, in May 2023, the suspect denied making posts in a chat group on the social media platform, Discord, suggesting that his account might have been hacked.
Sheriff’s investigators in Jackson County, which neighbors Winder, and where the suspect and his family previously lived, found they could not definitively link him to the posts and closed the investigation. The sheriff’s office said he notified the Jackson County middle school he attended, but School officials denied this this week He was informed about the threat.
But during that investigation, the suspect’s father, Colin Gray, described to a sheriff’s deputy the turmoil in his son’s life at home and at school.
Mr. Gray, 54, has now been charged with manslaughter and manslaughter in connection with the shooting because authorities said he knew the suspect was “a danger to himself and others” and still allowed him to use the military-style rifle. was The attack Federal law enforcement officials said Mr. Gray gave his son an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle as a Christmas present last year.
The shooting happened about a month into the school year at Apalachi, where the suspect had just started as a freshman. In the months leading up to the shooting, Ms. Brown said her nephew had requested mental health help, arguing that he had been deeply affected by the turmoil that had rocked him and his family in recent years.
During an earlier threat investigation, Mr. Gray told a sheriff’s deputy that his son had struggled at school. Other students at a Jackson County middle school “made fun of him day in and day out,” Mr. Gray said, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by The Times this week.
The family was evicted from their home and the parents separated, with the suspect apparently living in the new home with his father and the two younger siblings living with the mother at his parents’ home in Fitzgerald, Ga., several hours away. .
Ms Gray pleaded guilty in December to charges of criminal damage to property and “criminal undertaking/domestic violence”. She was ordered to pay restitution to a construction company where Mr. Gray worked and was barred from direct contact with her estranged husband, court records show.
She was arrested in November on suspicion of possessing small amounts of methamphetamine, fentanyl and muscle relaxants, according to an arrest warrant. But court records indicate she was not charged with drug possession.
Ms Gray declined to talk when a reporter knocked on her door on Thursday. Attempts to speak to the suspect’s father after the shooting were also unsuccessful. Mr Gray was charged on Thursday night.
The next morning, he made his initial appearance in court, sitting before the same judge who minutes earlier told his son that, if convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Post The family says the Georgia suspect’s mother called the school minutes before the shooting appeared first New York Times.