Father says suspect troubled by taunting and broken family

It was just the two of them, the teenager and his father, since an eviction a year earlier ended with the boy’s parents parting ways in a separation that fractured the entire family.

- RUSS BYNUM

People attend a vigil at a memorial for the shooting victims outside Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., Saturday.

That’s what Colin Gray told a Georgia sheriff’s investigator who came to his door in May 2023 asking whether an online threat to commit a school shooting had been posted by his son, Colt.

“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 AP. “I’m going to be mad as hell if he did, and then all the guns will go away.”

Now both Colt, 14, and Colin Gray, 54, are charged in the killings of two students and two teachers Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta. Nine others were hurt, seven of them shot. The Grays appeared Friday for the first time in court, where their attorneys declined to immediately seek bail.