The mother of the 14-year-old who has been charged with m*urder over the fatal shooting of four people at his Georgia high school called the school before the ki*llings, warning staff of an “extreme emergency” involving her son, a relative said.
Annie Brown told the Washington Post that her sister, Colt Gray’s mother, texted her saying she spoke with a school counselor and urged them to “immediately” find her son to check on him.
Brown provided screen shots of the text exchange to the newspaper, which also reported that a call log from the family’s shared phone plan showed a call was made to the school about 30 minutes before gunfire is believed to have erupted.
Brown confirmed the reporting to The Associated Press on Saturday in text messages but declined to provide further comment.
Colt Gray, 14, has been charged with mur*der over the ki*lling of two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta, on Wednesday. His father, Colin Gray, is accused of second-degree mu*rder for providing his son with a semiautomatic AR 15-style rifle.
The Georgia teenager had struggled with his parents’ separation and taunting by classmates, his father told a sheriff’s investigator last year when asked whether his son posted an online threat.
“I don’t know anything about him saying (expletive) like that,” Gray told Jackson County sheriff’s investigator Daniel Miller, according to a transcript of their interview obtained by the AP. “I’m going to be mad as hell if he did, and then all the guns will go away.”
Jackson County authorities ended their inquiry into Colt Gray a year ago, concluding that there wasn’t clear evidence to link him to a threat posted on Discord, a social media site popular with video gamers. The records from that investigation provide at least a narrow glimpse into a boy who struggled with his parents’ breakup and at 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 flustered and under pressure. He doesn’t really think straight,” Colin Gray told the investigator on May 21, 2023, recalling a discussion he’d had with the boy’s principal.
Middle school had also been rough for Colt Gray. He had just finished the seventh grade when Miller interviewed the father and son. Colin Gray said the boy had just a few friends and frequently got picked on. Some students “just ridiculed him day after day after day.”
“I don’t want him to fight anybody, but they just keep like pinching him and touching him,” Gray said. “Words are one thing, but you start touching him and that’s a whole different deal. And it’s just escalated to the point where like his finals were last week and that was the last thing on his mind.”
Shooting guns and hunting, he said, were frequent pastimes for father and son. Gray said he was encouraging the boy to be more active outdoors and spend less time playing video games on his Xbox. When Colt Gray k*illed a deer months earlier, his father swelled with pride. He showed the investigator a photo on his cellphone, saying: “You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer.”
“It was just the greatest day ever,” Colin Gray said.
