Father of Georgia school shooting suspect arrested on murder charge

The father of the teenager accused of opening fire at a Georgia high school, killing four people and wounding nine, has been arrested on various charges including second-degree murder.

Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, 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 said in a social media post.

No other details were immediately provided, but a news conference was planned for later in the day.

In Georgia, second-degree murder means a person has caused the death of another person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. It is punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison, while malice murder and felony murder carry a minimum sentence of life.

Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with murder in the shootings at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta, Georgia.

Arrest warrants obtained by the Associated Press accuse him of using a semiautomatic assault-style rifle in the attack, which killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine other people.

The teenager 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.

Conflicting evidence on the post’s origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report 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,” Ms Mangum told The Associated Press in an interview. “We did all we could do with what we had at the time.”

When a sheriff’s investigator from neighbouring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy had struggled with his parents’ separation and often got picked on at school. The teenager frequently fired guns and hunted with his father, who photographed him with a deer’s blood on his cheeks.

“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,” Colin Gray said according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff’s office.

The teenager was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI the then 13-year-old “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow” on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the sheriff’s office incident report.

The FBI’s tip pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to Colt Gray, the report said. But the boy said “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” according to the investigator’s report.

The interview transcript quotes the teenager as saying: “I promise I would never say something where …” with the rest of that denial listed as inaudible.

The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a digital evidence trail indicating it had been accessed in different Georgia cities as well as Buffalo, New York.

The classroom killings have set off debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to active shooter drills. But there has been little change to national gun laws.

Classes were cancelled on Thursday at the Georgia high school, although some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with heads bowed.

When the suspect slipped out of maths class on Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath figured her quiet classmate who recently transferred was skipping school again. But he returned later and wanted to return to the room. 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,” she said.

The teenager opened fire in the hallway, authorities said.

Ms Sayarath said she heard a barrage of 10 to 15 gunshots as pupils fell to the floor and crawled in search of a safe corner to hide.

Gray was being held Thursday at a regional youth detention facility. His first court appearance was scheduled for Friday morning.

He has been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey.

At least nine other people — eight students and one teacher at the school in Winder — were wounded and taken to hospitals. All were expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.

Authorities have not offered any motive or explained how the suspect obtained the gun and got it into the school of roughly 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of metro Atlanta’s ever-expanding sprawl.