Tip on school shooting threat last year led to suspect’s door

JEFFERSON, Ga. — The threat posted online last year to “shoot up a middle school” was the kind that authorities have become all too familiar with in the United States.

After receiving tips about the threat, authorities homed in on a 13-year-old boy in Georgia, and an investigator spoke with the teenager and his father.

During the conversation in May 2023, the boy, Colt Gray, assured the investigator, from the sheriff’s office in Jackson County, Georgia, that he had not made the threat. He said that he had not used Discord, the social media site where the threat was posted, in months, and that he had deleted his account.

“The only thing I have is TikTok, but I just go on there and watch videos,” the teenager said, according to a transcript obtained by The New York Times.

The teenager’s father, Colin Gray, confided that his son had been picked on in middle school and said that he had been teaching him about firearms and the outdoors to get him away from video games.

“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do and how to use them and not use them,” the elder Gray said, adding that his son had recently shot his first deer.

On Wednesday, nearly 16 months after that conversation, authorities say the teenager, now 14, walked into his high school in Winder, Georgia, armed with a military-style rifle and fatally shot two 14-year-old students and two math teachers before he was taken into custody by school resource officers. At least eight other students and a teacher were wounded. All were expected to make a full recovery, officials said.

Colt Gray has been charged with four counts of felony murder and will be prosecuted as an adult, authorities said. On Thursday night, law enforcement authorities in Georgia said they had arrested Colin Gray, 54, and charged him with two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children.

“These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a weapon,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at a news conference.

The earlier investigation of the student raised questions about whether anything more could have been done to prevent the deadliest school shooting in Georgia history, which left another American community stumbling through shock and grief at the toll of gun violence in a school.

Officials said the deadly rampage could have been even worse. The school had given every staff member a wearable panic button on a lanyard, and one of them quickly alerted the local sheriff’s office to the shooting. The security system was installed at Apalachee High School about a week ago, law enforcement officials said.

After authorities spoke to the teenager and his father in May 2023, they were unable to conclusively link the threat posted on Discord to the boy, according to an investigative report obtained by the Times.

In an interview Thursday, Sheriff Janis G. Mangum of Jackson County expressed anguish at the violence but said the threat had been properly investigated.

“I’m broken to think about what happened yesterday,” Mangum said. “That could have been any school. There’s other schools where this has happened. There’s evil in our society.”

The investigation began in May 2023, after the FBI received anonymous tips from California and Australia warning that a Discord user had threatened in a chat group to “shoot up a middle school,” according to investigators’ reports.

The FBI said the threat had included photos of guns. Investigators determined that the email address associated with the Discord account belonged to the younger Gray, who was 13 at the time and living in Jackson County.

The username on the account was “Lanza,” spelled in Russian, an investigator wrote in a report, noting that it was the surname of the perpetrator who killed 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.

A report from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office said that authorities interviewed father and son on May 20, 2023.

During the interview, the two said that they did not speak Russian, and the teenager denied posting the threat on Discord, telling an investigator “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner.”

He said that he once had a Discord account, but had deleted it. He said that he had been repeatedly hacked and was “afraid someone would use his information for nefarious purposes,” an investigator wrote. During the interview, an investigator noted that the teenager appeared to be calm and reserved.

The elder Gray said that he had hunting rifles in the house, but that his son did not have “unfettered” access to them. He said he would be “mad as hell” if his son had made the online threat, because “then all the guns will go away,” according to a transcript of his conversation.

The investigative record indicated that family had gone through a period of major upheaval.

The father told an investigator that he and his wife were separated and had been evicted from their home. His wife took their younger two children, he said, and he and his teenage son had moved into a new home.

Annie Brown, an aunt of the teenager, said in a text message Thursday that “the adults in his life let him down,” adding that “he was actively seeking help” regarding his mental health.

Investigators ultimately concluded that they could not determine the source of the threat posted on Discord.

“Due to the inconsistent nature of the information received by the FBI,” an investigator wrote, “the allegation that Colt or Colin is the user behind the Discord account that made the threat cannot be substantiated.”

Mangum said that her office had alerted Jefferson Middle School, where Colt Gray had been enrolled, to the threat, but the school year had already ended. This year, the boy started as a freshman at Apalachee High School.

“It’s not like we didn’t investigate it,” Mangum said. “It’s not just that we didn’t do anything.”

During a search of the teenager’s room after the shooting Wednesday, police found evidence that he was interested in mass shootings, particularly the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation.

President Joe Biden, speaking in Wisconsin before a speech on clean energy Thursday, called on Congress to pass a ban on assault-style weapons, as he did after previous mass shootings. Prospects for such legislation, however, appear slim in a divided Congress.

“We need more than thoughts and prayers,” Biden said. “Some of my Republican friends in Congress just finally have to say: ‘Enough is enough. We have to do something.’ “

The shooting Wednesday killed Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, who were both 14, and Christina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall, who were math teachers, state officials said. Aspinwall was also the football team’s defensive coordinator.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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