Georgia suspect Colt Gray honored Sandy Hook killer via Discord and kept writings on school shooters
Colt Gray, 14, appeared on the FBI’s radar in 2023 – a year before the deadly mass shooting at Apalachee High School
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The suspected shooter, who allegedly killed four people at a Georgia high school, was “obsessed” with prior school shootings, according to multiple reports.
Colt Gray, 14, a student at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, was taken into custody following the deadly mass shooting on Wednesday. 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 the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
At least nine other people — eight students and one teacher — were wounded and taken to hospitals. All were expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.
On Thursday, Colin Gray, 54, the father of the suspect, was arrested and charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children, according to GBI.
Colin Gray reportedly purchased his son an AR 15-style rifle as a holiday gift in 2023, law enforcement said, after they had been visited by officers about alleged threats in May 2023.
An investigation into the the boy’s life has revealed he had taken an interest in other infamous school shootings including Parkland in 2018 and Sandy Hook in 2012.
Authorities searched the teen’s bedroom at his Georgia home this week and found documents referencing past school shootings, a law enforcement source told CNN.
The documents included writings, believed to be written by Colt Gray, that referenced the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, in which former student Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people and wounded 17 others. Law enforcement sources told the New York Times that he was “obsessed” with the shooting.
More than a year before Gray allegedly went on the deadly rampage at his Georgia school, he was already on the FBI’s radar.
In May 2023, the father and son were interviewed by authorities from neighboring Jackson County who received a tip from the FBI that the boy, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow.”
The FBI’s tip had pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to the Georgia teen, the report said. But the boy told a sheriff’s investigator “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner.”
The account’s profile name, written in Russian, translated to “Lanza.” The investigator noted that Adam Lanza was the gunman who killed 20 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.
When questioned by the deputies, Gray’s father told them he had hunting guns in the house, but his son did not have unsupervised access to them.
But 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.
Authorities were still looking into how the teen got the gun into the school with about 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of metro Atlanta.
The Georgia attack is the latest in dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have set off fervent 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 canceled Thursday at the Georgia high school, though people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with heads bowed.
Colt Gray was taken to a regional youth detention facility on Thursday. His first court appearance is scheduled for Friday. He faces four counts of murder and is expected to be tried as an adult.