Colin Gray, the father of Colt Gray, Apalachee high school shooter charged on series of charges after supplying teen son with AR-15 rifle that led to him carrying out mass shooting, after previously joking he would never let such a thing happen during a FBI probe last year and having been ordered to keep weapons away from his son.
The father of Colt Gray, the 14 year old Winder, Georgia teen suspected of fatally shooting four people and wounding several others at Apalachee High School, Wednesday, was on Thursday night, arrested.
A GBI spokesperson announced that Colin Gray, 54, faced a number of charges, including, 4 counts of involuntary manslaughter, 2 counts of second degree murder and 8 counts of cruelty to children.
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FBI insists it did not ‘drop the ball’
Colt Gray, has since been charged as an adult with murder in the shootings that killed four people and wounded nine. He’s been charged with four counts of felony murder, authorities say.
‘He knowingly allowed his son Colt to possess a weapon,’ said authorities during a press conference on Thursday evening, WSAV reported.
A previous report told of the father wilfully buying his teen son an AR-15 style rifle for Christmas, just months after the boy was probed by the FBI for possibly conspiring to affect a mass shooting
During interviews with Georgia’s Bureau of Investigations and Jackson County, GA authorities, the 14-year-old denied threatening to carry out a school shooting following a menacing post uncovered on social media site Discord.
Conflicting evidence on the post’s origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, investigators 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,’ Mangum told AP in an interview. ‘We did all we could do with what we had at the time.’
Ordered to keep weapons away from his son only to end up gifting boy high velocity rifle
Arrest warrants obtained by the AP accuse the teen of using a semiautomatic assault-style rifle in the attack, which killed two students and two teachers in the hallway outside his algebra classroom.
The teenager was interviewed by a sheriff’s investigator from neighboring Jackson County who received a tip from the FBI that the boy, 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 Jackson County sheriff’s report obtained by The Associated Press.
The FBI’s tip pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to the Georgia teen, the report said. But the boy told a sheriff’s investigator ‘he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner.’
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.
At the time the father was ordered to keep all weapons away from his teen son, only to end up buying the boy a high velocity AR-15 style rifle for Christmas just months later.
Colt Gray is slated to make his first court appearance on Friday.
Wednesday’s shooting in Georgia was the deadliest at a school this year, based on data from the Gun Violence Archive. It is also the deadliest school shooting in state history.
