Teen and father charged in Georgia school shooting appear in court

WINDER, Ga. — A father and son arrested after Georgia’s deadliest school shooting made their first court appearances half an hour apart Friday morning, sitting at the same defense table in the same courtroom as a list of grim charges against them were read.

The father, appearing distraught, rocked back and forth in a chair throughout his brief appearance. Family members of those killed in the shooting lined the first row of the courtroom and spilled into the second. They sat quietly, with some wiping their eyes.

The 14-year-old accused of slaying two students and two teachers Wednesday morning at Apalachee High School, where he was a freshman, faces four counts of felony murder. If convicted, he could serve life in prison, with or without parole.

His father, Colin Gray, 54, who faces murder and manslaughter charges, is accused of allowing his son to have access to the military-style rifle used in the shooting despite knowing “he was a threat to himself and others,” according to arrest warrants.

The gun, a black AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, was a Christmas present to the boy, Colt Gray, from his father in 2023, according to three law enforcement officials.

Father and son were both represented by public defenders, and neither entered a plea or requested bond. Preliminary hearings for both were set for Dec. 4.

The initial Barrow County court appearances came as conflicting accounts emerged from officials in neighboring Jackson County, where the son attended middle school. The county sheriff said earlier this week that schools there had been told of an investigation last year into whether the boy had made online threats, but school officials said Friday that they were never informed.

The discrepancy added to questions building in the community about whether anything could have been done to prevent the shooting that killed Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and two math teachers, Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie. Nine other people were hospitalized with injuries.

The teenager’s hearing Friday morning in the courtroom in Winder, Georgia, lasted less than 10 minutes. The boy, whose face was not visible to cameras because of rules involving minors, briefly answered procedural questions from Judge Currie M. Mingledorff II before he was escorted out. He was shackled and wore a green T-shirt with khaki pants and boots.

Not long after, the judge brought the teenager back into the courtroom to tell him that because he was a minor, he would not face the death penalty.

Colin Gray was arrested Thursday and charged with second-degree murder and other crimes in connection with the attack. Mingledorff told Gray that the maximum penalty for the charges against him, which include involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children, would add up to 180 years in prison.

In Georgia on Wednesday, the school went into lockdown at the sound of gunshots. The locked classroom doors, as well as a newly installed alarm system, may have helped prevent further bloodshed, officials said.

Some students said they had huddled quietly in their classrooms for more than an hour, and many left their phones behind when they eventually evacuated to the school’s football field, making it hard for them to connect with anxious family members. Traffic snarled around the school as parents scrambled to find their children.

The suspect surrendered to school resource officers and was taken into custody, law enforcement officials said. Police have found evidence that he was interested in mass shootings, particularly the 2018 massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation.

In May of last year, when the boy and his father lived in Jackson County, FBI officials were alerted to some disturbing messages on Discord, a social media platform: Someone in a chat group had threatened to possibly “shoot up a middle school.”

A report from the Jackson County sheriff’s office, obtained by The New York Times, said that an email associated with the Discord user who had made the threat belonged to Colt Gray, then 13, who denied that he had made the post.

At the time, Colin Gray told an investigator that he and his wife were no longer together and that they had been evicted from their home, according to a transcript of a May 2023 interview obtained by the Times. Records from the 2022 eviction show that Gray owned a black AR-15, as well as several other guns.

The father told investigators in 2023 that his son did not have “unfettered” access to firearms, and they were not able to definitively link the boy to the threat. Nevertheless, officials “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject,” Sheriff Janis Mangum of Jackson County said in a social media post Wednesday.

But on Friday, Donna McMullan, superintendent of the Jefferson City School District in Jackson County, wrote an email to parents saying that school officials were not aware of the threats and have “no record of an investigation.” The suspect attended middle school in the district during the 2022-23 school year, McMullan said.

Mangum told the Times in an interview that an employee who no longer works for the department communicated with the FBI about the investigation, and provided the Times with a copy of his email to the agency, which said, “We have made area schools aware and will monitor the subject.”

“I can’t prove whether he contacted them or not,” she said. “All I have is the email.” The former employee could not immediately be reached for comment.

The sheriff said she told McMullan to issue the statement to parents if the superintendent did not recall being informed. “I don’t want the school bashed for not passing on the information to Barrow County schools, when the schools here might not have got notified,” Mangum said.

Aftershocks of the attack continued to be felt beyond the small community of Winder. On Friday, officials with Atlanta Public Schools sent a text message to parents about “an uptick in social media threats directed toward some of our schools,” though they said that the threats so far were believed to be hoaxes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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