Mother of Georgia shooting suspect ‘warned school of extreme emergency’

The mother of the 14-year-old charged with murder over the shooting of four people at his Georgia high school called to warn staff of an “extreme emergency” involving her son, a relative said.

Annie Brown told the Washington Post that her sister, Colt Gray’s mother, texted her to say she spoke to a school counsellor and urged them to “immediately” find her son to check on him.

Ms Brown provided screen shots of the text exchange to the newspaper, which also reported that a log from the family’s shared phone plan showed a call was made to the school about 30 minutes before gunfire is believed to have erupted.

Ms Brown confirmed the reporting to The Associated Press on Saturday but declined to provide further comment.

Colt Gray, 14, has been charged with murder over the killing of two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta, on Wednesday.

His father, Colin Gray, is accused of second-degree murder for providing his son with a semiautomatic AR 15-style rifle.

Their lawyers declined to seek bail during their first court appearance on Friday.

The Georgia teenager had struggled with his parents’ separation and taunting by classmates, his father told a sheriff’s investigator last year when asked whether his son posted an online threat.

“I don’t know anything about him saying (expletive) like that,” Gray told Jackson County sheriff’s investigator Daniel Miller, according to a transcript of their interview obtained by the AP. “I’m going to be mad as hell if he did, and then all the guns will go away.”

Jackson County authorities ended their inquiry into Colt Gray a year ago, concluding that there was not clear evidence to link him to a threat posted on Discord, a social media site popular with video gamers.

The records from that investigation provide at least a narrow glimpse into a boy who struggled with his parents’ break-up and at the middle school he attended at the time, where his father said others frequently taunted him.

“He gets flustered and under pressure. He doesn’t really think straight,” Colin Gray told the investigator on May 21 2023, recalling a discussion he had had with the boy’s principal.

Colt Gray had just finished the seventh grade when Mr Miller interviewed the father and son. Colin Gray said the boy had just a few friends and frequently got picked on. Some students “just ridiculed him day after day after day”, he said.

“I don’t want him to fight anybody, but they just keep like pinching him and touching him,” Gray said. “Words are one thing, but you start touching him and that’s a whole different deal. And it’s just escalated to the point where like his finals were last week and that was the last thing on his mind.”

Shooting guns and hunting, he said, were frequent pastimes for father and son.

Gray said he was encouraging the boy to be more active outdoors and spend less time playing video games on his Xbox.

When Colt Gray killed a deer months earlier, his father swelled with pride.

He showed the investigator a photo on his mobile phone, saying: “You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer.”

“It was just the greatest day ever,” Colin Gray said.

There is no mention in the investigator’s report and interview transcript of either Gray owning an assault-style rifle. Asked if his son had access to firearms, the father said “yes” but he said the guns were not kept loaded and insisted he had emphasized safety when teaching the boy to shoot.

“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do “and how to use them and not use them,” Gray said