The father of a Georgia school teenager faces second-degree murder charges

Colin Gray, 54, Colt Gray’s father, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of child cruelty, the Bureau of Investigation said. Georgia in a social media post. No other details were immediately provided. A news conference was planned for later Thursday.

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

Conflicting evidence about the origin of the post has left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and found nothing to warrant filing charges at that time.

“We didn’t drop the ball with it at all,” Mangum told The Associated Press in an interview. “We did the best we could do with what we had at the time.”

When a sheriff’s investigator in nearby Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy struggled with his parents’ separation and was often picked up at school. The teenager frequently shot guns and hunted with his father, who photographed him with deer blood on his cheeks.

“He knows the gravity of guns and what they can do and how to use them and not use them,” said the father, Colin Gray, according to a transcript obtained by the sheriff’s office.

The teenager was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Gray, then 13, “had 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 tip pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to Colt Gray, the report said. But the boy said he would “never say something like that, not even jokingly,” according to the investigator’s report.

The transcript of the interview quotes the teenager as saying, “I promise I’ll never say anything where…”, with the rest of the denial listed as inaudible.

The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” from the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a digital trail of evidence indicating it was accessed in various Georgia cities as well as Buffalo, New york.

The attack was the latest in dozens of school shootings in the US in recent years, including the most deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have sparked heated debates about gun control and rattled the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to active shooter drills. But national gun laws have seen little change.

Classes were canceled Thursday at the Georgia high school, although some people came to leave flowers around the pole and kneel in the grass with their heads bowed.

When the suspect walked out of math class on Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath realized her quiet classmate, who recently transferred, was skipping school again. But he came back later and wanted to go back to the room. Some students went to open the locked door but backed away.

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

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

Sayarath said he heard a barrage of 10 to 15 gunshots. The students fell to the floor and crawled in search of a safe corner to hide.

Two school resource officers confronted the shooter within minutes of the shootings being reported, Hosey said. The teenager surrendered immediately.

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

He was charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, according to the director of the Bureau of Investigation Georgia, Chris Hosey.

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

Authorities have not offered a motive or explained how the suspect obtained the gun and brought it to the school of about 1,900 students in a fast-growing area on the edge of Atlanta’s ever-expanding metropolitan area.

It was the 30th mass killing in the US so far this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 people died in the killings, which are defined as events in which four or more people die in a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.

There have been previous cases where someone who was once on the FBI’s radar but was not arrested went on to commit violence.

A month before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at a Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018, the office received a tip that he had talked about committing a mass shooting. The FBI also investigated a tip about the person later convicted in a fatal 2022 shooting at a Colorado gay nightclub.

The model highlights the challenges law enforcement faces in trying to determine when the conduct in question crosses over into a crime. Investigators review tens of thousands of tips each year to try to determine which might pose a viable threat. Cases like the Georgia school shooting raise new questions about whether a more intensive investigation could have prevented the violence.

The sheriff’s report says Investigator Daniel Miller spoke with the boy and his father on May 21, 2023. The father said his son had access to guns in the home.

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

He captioned a cell phone photo from a recent hunting trip with his son: “You see him with blood on his cheeks after 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 earlier after his account was hacked.

“I have to take your word for it, and I hope you’re being honest with me,” Miller replied.

A phone number associated with the account was linked to another person in another city in Georgia, the report said. The profile name of the account, written in Russian, has been translated into Lanza. The investigator noted that Adam Lanza was the perpetrator of the 2012 mass shooting that killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The sheriff’s office alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the teenager. But the investigator concluded that he “could not justify the tip we received from the FBI to take further action.”