Father of teen suspect in deadly U.S. school shooting arrested, facing multiple charges
FBI received tips about online school shooting threat, but teen now in custody denied involvement
The father of the teenager accused of killing four people and wounding nine in a Georgia high school shooting has been arrested on charges that include second-degree murder, authorities said Thursday.
Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, 14, 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 (GBI) said in a social media post.
"These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a weapon," GBI director Chris Hosey said at an evening news conference. "His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon."
In Georgia, second-degree murder is punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison, while malice murder and felony murder carry a minimum sentence of life imprisonment.
Authorities have charged the teenager as an adult with murder in the shootings Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta. Arrest warrants obtained by the Associated Press accuse him of using a semi-automatic assault-style rifle in the attack, which killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine other people.
The victims have been identified as students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and instructors Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53.
Authorities said Thursday evening the wounded are all expected to make a full recovery.
The teen 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 obtained Thursday.
More than a year ago, tips about online posts threatening a school shooting led Georgia police to interview a 13-year-old boy, but investigators didn't have enough evidence for an arrest.
The teenager was interviewed in May 2023 by a sheriff's investigator from neighbouring Jackson County who received a tip from the FBI that the boy "had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow."
The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the Jackson County sheriff's report obtained by The Associated Press.
The sheriff's office interviewed the then-13-year-old and his father, who said there were hunting guns in the house but the teen did not have unsupervised access to them.
The teen also denied making any online threats. The sheriff's office alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the teen, but there was no probable cause for arrest or additional action, the FBI 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."
Hosey said the state Division of Family and Children's Services also had previous contact with the teen and will investigate whether that has any connection to the shooting. Local news outlets reported that law enforcement on Wednesday searched the teen's family home in Bethlehem, Ga., east of the high school.
Authorities were still looking into how the teen obtained the gun used in the shooting and got it into the school, which has about 1,900 students.
'I just started shaking and crying'
Armed with an assault-style rifle, the teen turned the gun on students in a hallway at the school when classmates refused to open the door for him to return to his algebra classroom, classmate Lyela Sayarath said.
The teen earlier left the classroom, and Sayarath figured the quiet student who recently transferred was skipping school again. But he returned later and wanted back in the classroom. 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," Sayarath said. When she looked at him through a window in the door, she saw the student turn and heard a barrage of gunshots.
"It was about 10 or 15 of them at once, back to back," she said. The math students ducked onto the floor and sporadically crawled around, looking for a safe corner to hide.
Two school resource officers encountered the shooter within minutes after a report of shots fired went out, Hosey said. The teen immediately surrendered and was taken into custody.
Christopher Vasquez, 15, said he was in band practice when the lockdown order was issued.
"Once we heard banging at the door and the SWAT [team] came to take us out, that's when I knew that it was serious," he said at a Wednesday night vigil. "I just started shaking and crying.
"I just was praying that everyone I love was safe," he added.
Guns leading cause of death for U.S. kids
U.S. 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 in classrooms. But they have done little to move the needle on national gun laws.
Before Wednesday, there had been 29 mass killings in the U.S. so far this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 people have died in those killings, which are defined as incidents in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.
While mass shootings often get significant attention in broadcast news media coverage, they account for a very small percentage of the human losses U.S. sees each year from gun violence.
A little over 48,000 people died by gunfire in 2022, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with just under 20,000 attributable to homicide. The majority of deaths were declared suicides, with others accidental.
But guns have been the leading cause of death for children and teens for five consecutive years, with 4,590 under the age of 19 killed in 2022.
With files from CBC News