LAST UPDATE | 6 Sep
THE 14-YEAR-OLD suspect in a shooting at a Georgia high school in which four people died will stay in detention as his lawyer declined to seek bail at a court hearing today.
The hearing of teenager Colt Gray came a day after his father was also arrested for allowing his son to have a weapon.
Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a social media post.
The charges come after Gray “knowingly” allowed his son to possess a weapon, Georgia Bureau of Investigation director Chris Hosey told a press conference.
In Georgia, second-degree murder means a person has caused the death of another person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent.
It is punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison, while malice murder and felony murder carry a minimum sentence of life.
Parental responsibility in mass shootings, particularly those carried out by minors, has come increasingly under the spotlight in recent months.
After Colin’s hearing, his son Colt Gray, wearing khaki pants and a green shirt, was escorted out of court in shackles on his wrists and ankles.
The judge then called him back to the courtroom to correct an earlier misstatement that his crimes could be punishable by death.
Because he is a juvenile, the maximum penalty he would face is life without parole.
The judge also set another hearing for 4 December.
According to arrest warrants obtained by The Associated Press, Colt Gray is accused of using a semiautomatic assault-style rifle to kill two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder, outside Atlanta.
“How could you have an assault rifle, a weapon in a house, not locked up and knowing your kid knows where it is?” lamented US President Joe Biden, speaking to reporters in Wisconsin yesterday.
“You’ve got to hold parents accountable if they let their child have access to these guns.”
Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with murder in the shootings at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta, Georgia.
UPDATE #4 - September 5, 2024:
— GA Bureau of Investigation (@GBI_GA) September 6, 2024
A few notes from our 8 p.m. news conference today:
Colin Gray was arrested on multiple charges earlier today. He knowingly allowed his son, Colt, to have the weapon.
(1/4) https://t.co/qenBmWBK8A
The teenager denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when authorities interviewed him last year about a menacing post on social media, according to a sheriff’s report.
Conflicting evidence on the post’s origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report said.
Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the report from May 2023 and found nothing that would have justified bringing charges at the time.
“We did not drop the ball at all on this,” Mangum told The Associated Press in an interview. “We did all we could do with what we had at the time.”
When a sheriff’s investigator from neighbouring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy had struggled with his parents’ separation and often got picked on at school.
The teenager frequently fired guns and hunted with his father, who photographed him with a deer’s blood on his cheeks.
“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,” Colin Gray said according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff’s office.
The teenager was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI the then 13-year-old “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow” on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the sheriff’s office incident report.
The FBI’s 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 such a thing, even in a joking manner,” according to the investigator’s report.
The interview transcript quotes the teenager as saying: “I promise I would never say something where …” with the rest of that denial listed as inaudible.
The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a digital evidence trail indicating it had been accessed in different Georgia cities as well as Buffalo, New York.
The classroom killings have set off debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to active shooter drills. But there has been little change to national gun laws.
Classes were cancelled yesterday at the Georgia high school, although some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with heads bowed.
When the suspect slipped out of maths class on Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath figured her quiet classmate who recently transferred was skipping school again. But he returned later and wanted to return to the room. Some students went to open the locked door but instead backed away.
“I’m guessing they saw something, but for some reason, they didn’t open the door,” she said.
The teenager opened fire in the hallway, authorities said.
Sayarath said she heard a barrage of 10 to 15 gunshots as pupils fell to the floor and crawled in search of a safe corner to hide.
Gray was being held Thursday at a regional youth detention facility. His first court appearance is scheduled for this morning.
He has been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey.
At least nine other people – eight students and one teacher at the school in Winder – were wounded and taken to hospitals. All were expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.
Authorities have not offered any motive or explained how the suspect obtained the gun and got it into the school of roughly 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of metro Atlanta’s ever-expanding sprawl.
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