More than a year before the massacre at Apalachee High School in Georgia, the mother of 14-year-old gunman Colt Gray left him alone to live with his allegedly abusive father after an eviction led to his parents’ split.
The situation with Colt’s parents was already turbulent, with reports of heated arguments outside the family home and mother Marcee Gray’s years-long criminal history, including accusations of DUI, domestic violence and possession of drugs such as fentanyl and meth.
Colt “struggled at first with the separation and all,” his father, Colin Gray, told Jackson County Sheriff’s investigator Daniel Miller back in May 2023, according to newly obtained transcripts.
Miller at the time had been investigating online threats to carry out a school shooting, allegedly shared on Discord by Colt, who was 13 at the time.
“I don’t know anything about him saying anything [expletive] like that,” Gray said when questioned about the threats. “I’m going to be mad as hell if he did, and then all the guns will go away.”
But Gray did not block his son’s access to guns, even after the law enforcement investigation, which wrapped last year when authorities failed to uncover enough evidence to arrest Colt for the online threats.
Instead, Gray reportedly went on to gift his son an AR-15 style rifle, which he then used to carry out the attack on his high school in Winder, a suburb roughly 50 miles northeast of Atlanta.
Authorities said Colt shot and killed four people at Apalachee High School Wednesday morning before he was approached by a school resource officer and almost immediately surrendered. He was taken into custody without further incident and charged with four counts of felony murder.
Math teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, were killed in the rampage, as were Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, who were both 14-year-old students at Apalachee, officials said. Another nine people, among them a teacher, were hospitalized.
In the aftermath of the shooting, 54-year-old Gray was accused of enabling his son to carry out the classroom carnage. He was arrested on Thursday and charged with more than a dozen counts, including two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children — all of which are felonies.
“[Colt] knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,” Gray told Miller back in 2023, emphasizing that he was teaching Colt how to hunt and properly handle firearms. He added that just months earlier, Colt had shot and killed his first deer.
“You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer,” the proud father told Miller, showing off a photo of the moment. “It was just the greatest day ever.”
Gray went on to explain that hunting and shooting was not only an activity they could enjoy together, but an outlet for his son, who struggled to make friends in middle school.
Some students “just ridiculed him day after day after day,” Gray said during the interview, adding that the bullying got so bad Colt asked to change school districts.
“I don’t want him to fight anybody, but they just keep like pinching him and touching him,” he said at the time. “Words are one thing, but you start touching him and that’s a whole different deal.”
Around the same time, Colt was also trying to weather the tensions between his parents, which reached a boiling point after they were evicted from their home. Gray said his wife left him shortly after getting kicked out, taking their two younger children with her.
A former landlord, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Independent he was forced to boot the couple and their three kids after they fell behind on rent — a claim Gray denied in his 2023 police interview.
“The craziest part of all is that they left [their] two German Shepherds,” the landlord said Friday, noting that Colt’s parents ignored his efforts to reunite them with the dogs.
Colin Gray did, however, return to retrieve some firearms he left behind, the landlord said. Upon learning the locks had been changed, Gray allegedly “kicked in the door to get his guns out.”
The landlord said the situation at the Grays’ home had been troublesome from the moment they moved in. He said Marcee Gray appeared “scared as hell” of her husband, whom she has accused of being verbally abusive.
“Finally separated from my abusive husband of almost 14 years,” Marcee wrote in a LinkedIn comment in December 2022, according to CNN.
Colt’s maternal grandfather, Charles Polhamus, told the outlet his grandson also experienced verbal and emotional abuse at the hands of his father.
Colin Gray, 54, the father of Apalachee High School shooter Colt Gray, 14, enters the Barrow County courthouse for his first appearance, on Friday, Sept. 6, 2024, in Winder, Ga.
The “toxic” environment was confirmed by other family members and neighbors — one of whom said Colt’s home life was “absolutely horrible.”
On Friday, former neighbor Lauren Vickers told TMZ that Child Protective Services had been called to the residence around four different times. She said she placed at least one of those calls after witnessing Colt’s younger siblings being locked out of the house at night, left outdoors to cry and scream.
Despite all of Colt’s struggles at home and at school, Colin Gray told the investigator his son was not the type to threaten or carry out violence.
“He’s not a loner, Officer Miller,” the father said. “He just wants to go to school, do his own thing and he doesn’t want any trouble.”
Meanwhile, the former landlord said that upon looking back on the “weird, weird situation” at the Gray family home, Wednesday’s shooting perhaps “wasn’t as shocking” as it first seemed.