Georgia school shooter
Colt Gray was bullied by classmates who called him gay, his father told detectives in an interview last year.
Colin Grey, 54, made the claims when he was interviewed by the Jackson County Sheriff's office after the
FBI received a tip that his son had threatened a shooting at his middle school.
'It was very difficult for him to go to school and not get picked on,' Colin Gray told an investigator, according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by DailyMail.com.
The father added: 'It went from one thing to another... I was trying to get him on the golf team... [they were like] Oh, look, Colt's gay. He's dating that guy. Just ridiculed him day after day after day.'
Gray, 14, is charged as an adult in the deaths of Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. Nine people were also hurt in Wednesday’s attack at Apalachee High school in Winder, outside of Atlanta.
He and his father appeared in back-to-back hearings Friday morning with about 50 onlookers in the courtroom. The elder Gray is also charged in connection with the shooting, including with counts of involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder.
Colin Gray told police this week he purchased the weapon used in the killings as Christmas present for his son last December, according to authorities.
The teen was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Gray, then 13, '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 sheriff's office incident report.
The post read: 'im committing a mass shooting and im waiting a good 2-3 years... I cant kill myself yet, cause I’m not contributing anything to culture I need to go out knowing I did.'
The poster added, 'I'm ready,' above a photograph of two guns.
They had reportedly referenced the Sandy Hook shooting and expressed frustration 'with the acceptance of transgender people,' CNN reported.
Speaking to police in May, 2023, Colin said he had recently separated from his son's mother, and that 'she took his younger two' kids, leaving him to care for Colt, who he said was struggling at Jefferson Middle School.
The father said Colt 'gets flustered and under pressure,' and 'doesn't really think straight.'
Colin added that he was trying to teach his son about weapons and get him interested in the outdoors in order to 'get him away from those video games.'
He showed the officer a picture of Colt with blood smeared on his face and said it was from when the teen shot his first deer, which the father described as the 'best day ever.'
'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 father claimed he and his son talked about school shootings 'quite a bit,' adding that 'you never really know and I don't want anything to happen to him.'
Colin reportedly assured officers that he would be 'mad as hell' if he learned the allegations about his son making threats were true, and that 'all the guns [would] go away.'
On Friday the teen appeared in court in person in shackles, dressed in a green t-shirt and grey sweat pants. He kept his head down, with his hair covering his face, and spoke softly only to Judge Currie Mingledorff, replying ‘yes sir’ when asked to confirm his name.
Meanwhile his father cried as he appeared shortly after his son in the same courtroom, charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two of second degree murder and eight of cruelty to children.
Judge Mingledorff brought Gray back in to correct a statement he made, telling him: ‘I wanted to make it clear to you that the penalty does not include death. It includes life without the possibility of parole or with the possibility of parole.’
A 2005 Supreme Court decision forbids the execution of offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed.
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 the 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.
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 teen 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.
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.'
The Discord account had a user name written in Russian, and the translation of the letters spelled out the name Lanza, referencing Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook Elementary school tragedy, officers said.
Gray denied he was the author of the threats, telling police he'd shut down his Discord after being repeatedly hacked. He expressed concerns that someone would make those accusations about him.
'He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,' the father, Colin Gray, said according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff's office.
The sheriff's investigators closed the case after being unable to substantiate that either Gray was connected to the Discord account, and did not find grounds to seek the needed court order to confiscate the family's guns, according to police reports released by the sheriff's office on Thursday.
The boy reportedly had an obsession with other infamous school shooters such as Parkland, Florida killer Nikolas Cruz.
