Aunt says suspect in Georgia school massacre had mental health issues

The father of the 14-year-old suspected of mass murder at Apalachee High School in the US state of Georgia has been charged in connection with the murders, including four counts of manslaughter, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced on social media on Thursday evening.

His son, Colt Gray, was charged with quadruple murder and, according to one of his aunts, had been “begging for psychiatric help for months” before allegedly carrying out Wednesday’s attack that left four people dead and nine others injured.

He “begged everyone around him for help,” his aunt Annie Brown told the Washington Post. “The adults around him failed him.”

Brown, who lives in central Florida, declined to elaborate on the teen’s mental health issues but said she has tried to help him from afar. In text messages to a relative last month, she expressed concern that her nephew had access to a gun, according to screenshots she provided to The Post. Last week, she wrote that her mother – the suspect’s grandmother – had gone to a counselor at his school to ask for help, the screenshots show.

He “starts therapy tomorrow,” his grandmother wrote in a text message a week before he opened fire on classmates.

Brown said her nephew’s problems were exacerbated by a difficult home life. The teen’s mother pleaded guilty to domestic violence last December and was ordered to have no contact with Colin Gray, her husband and the father of the suspected shooter, according to Barrow County Superior Court records. The charges against Colin Gray Thursday, including two counts of first-degree murder and eight counts of child abuse, stem from knowingly allowing his son to possess a gun, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference Thursday evening.

The family had “already been in contact” with the local youth welfare office, Hosey said previously.

As investigators continued to search for a motive for the shooting Thursday, the father’s arrest, the aunt’s testimony and other new details helped paint a picture of the suspect. At the same time, it raised questions about whether key authority figures – including his family and law enforcement – may have missed warning signs and opportunities to prevent the Apalachee tragedy.

The teen had also come to the attention of law enforcement officers in Georgia who were following up on an FBI tip that threatened to open fire at a school online more than a year before the Apalachee shooting. At the time, in May 2023, the teen’s father told the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office that his son was not allowed to use guns without supervision, according to records of the office’s investigation obtained by The Post. The teen told officers he was worried someone might imply he was threatening to “shoot up a school, and stated that he would never say something like that, even in jest,” according to the records.

During a search of the suspect’s home after the Apalachee High shooting, authorities found paperwork with references to previous school shootings, including the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation.

Neither Gray’s parents nor his grandmother have commented publicly. The Post’s efforts to reach them for comment were unsuccessful. A spokesman for the Barrow County School District did not respond to requests for comment.

The 2023 investigation that put Jackson County Sheriff’s Office investigators in touch with Colt Gray was sparked by threatening comments on the social media platform Discord, according to records obtained by The Post. The comments came from an account linked to an email address the FBI believed belonged to Gray, the records say.

The teenager told officers that he had previously used Discord but had deleted his account months earlier “because too many people were hacking his account and he was afraid someone might use his information for nefarious purposes,” according to records.

The Discord account flagged by the FBI in 2023 had a profile name written in Russian that translated to “Lanza,” and according to records, referred to Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter.

Colin Gray told investigators at the time that he did not know Discord and had no knowledge of the email address associated with the Discord account used to spread the threats. He also said, according to the records, that his son “does not speak Russian and does not understand it.”

He told officers that he had allowed his son to use his hunting rifles under supervision, but that the child, who was 13 at the time, had not had “unrestricted access to them.” The weapons were kept in the house, the report said.

Records show that on May 21 of last year, an officer asked the man to lock up the firearms and advised him to “keep the teenager away from school until the matter was resolved.”

Also on May 21, 2023, Discord deleted an account believed to be linked to the suspect, according to Jud Hoffman, vice president of trust and safety at Discord. The account, created weeks earlier on April 2, violated the company’s anti-extremism policies, Hoffman said. Discord cooperated with law enforcement at the time and has no evidence that the suspect used the platform to plan the Apalachee attack, Hoffman said.

On May 23, two days after the Grays were first interviewed, the investigator determined that the case could be “dismissed as an exception” because the tip about Colt Gray’s role in the threat could not be substantiated. Officials could not confirm that the Discord account was connected to Colt Gray, and the information contained in the FBI tip was “unreliable,” the documents state. Officials noted in the report that the FBI tip included a brief description of the suspect that did not match the teen’s appearance. The source of the description was unclear in the documents.

At the time, Jackson County officials “alerted local schools to continue monitoring the individual,” Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said in a statement Wednesday. The FBI office in Atlanta said in a statement that there was no sufficient cause for an arrest or further police action.

At the time of the Jackson County investigation, the teen’s father told officers he and his wife had separated after the family was evicted from their home several months earlier. The father said he and his son had moved and although his son had “had some problems” at the middle school he previously attended, the situation has “gotten much better” now that he is attending a new school.

It is unclear when the teenager left Jefferson Middle School in Jefferson, Georgia.

The following year was one of legal turmoil for his mother, Marcee Gray. In early November, she was arrested during a traffic stop and charged with possession of methamphetamine, fentanyl and muscle relaxants. An arrest warrant signed by an officer with the Barrow County Sheriff’s Office also alleged that Gray had a glass pipe for injecting narcotics and had concealed the identity of the Nissan Rogue she was driving by putting up a plate for a Nissan Kick.

According to court records, Marcee Gray, 43, was ultimately not charged with drug possession and pleaded guilty to a license plate violation on Dec. 21. That same day, Gray also pleaded guilty to a single count of trespassing/domestic violence and second-degree criminal damage to property — but details of the incident that led to those charges and when it occurred are not available in publicly available court records.

Marcee Gray was sentenced to five years in prison, with the first 46 days in custody and the remainder suspended. As a condition of her probation, according to her guilty plea, she was prohibited from having any contact with her husband, Colin Gray, except through a third party in matters involving her children or divorce. She was ordered to participate in a domestic violence intervention program and abstain from drugs and alcohol.

She was also ordered to pay more than $1,500 in restitution to Atlanta-based Van Winkle Construction. Colin Gray had listed that company as his employer on his LinkedIn profile, but it was not immediately clear if he still worked there. Shane Hornbuckle, an executive at the company, did not respond to a request for comment.

An April court order noted that Marcee Gray was in custody at the time at the Ben Hill County Jail in Fitzgerald, Georgia — three hours south of Atlanta, where members of her family live. Court records in Ben Hill County were not immediately available, but a police report released on Jan. 3 indicated that Gray had been arrested by local police on charges of aggravated assault, theft by taking, trespassing, false imprisonment and failure to appear in court.

Brown, Gray’s aunt, said that in January – in the midst of this tumultuous time – she helped her nephew enroll in Haymon-Morris Middle School in Barrow County so he could finish eighth grade after a period of absence.

He had just started ninth grade at Apalachee High this school year, she said.

Law enforcement has confirmed he was a student at Apalachee, and a classmate there described him to CNN on Wednesday as quiet and often absent from class. The school district spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on his enrollment history.

Brown said that since the shooting, she has been praying for “the families affected by my nephew’s actions.”

She said she would continue to support her nephew. Without excusing his behavior, Brown said he was still “just a baby” who had never been given the mental health support he needed and repeatedly asked for.

Bailey reported from Winder, Ga. Alice Crites, Chris Dehghanpoor, Perry Stein and Pranshu Verma contributed to this report.