Tip from Australia among those warning of risk of Georgia school shooting: report

Atlanta: The father of 14-year-old Colt Gray has been arrested in connection with the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and as reported by CNN.

Colt, a student at the school, opened fire on Wednesday (US time), killing two students and two teachers and wounding nine, law enforcement officials said.

A student weeps at a makeshift memorial after the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, on Wednesday.Credit: AP

Colin Gray, 54, has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children.

Investigators in Georgia are piecing together how the teenager obtained the semiautomatic rifle he used to carry out the mass shooting and whether there were any additional warning signs after authorities visited his home a year ago.

The Barrow County Sheriff’s Office photo of Colt Gray, 14, who has been charged with murder over the shootings at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.Credit: AP

Colin and Colt Gray were interviewed by local law enforcement last year in connection with online threats about carrying out a school shooting. The threats were made on the gaming social media platform Discord, investigators say.

Tips sent to the FBI, including from Australia, warned that a threat had been made in a chat group to “shoot up a middle school”, The New York Times reported.

The tips were from computers based in Palmdale and Los Angeles, California, and Cockburn, Western Australia, the Times reported. However, police at the time could not definitively link the threats to the Grays, it reported.

Both Grays told investigators they had not made the threats. The father also told officials that he had hunting guns locked in a safe in the house and his son did not have access to them.

The shooter’s ability to obtain the semiautomatic rifle, any signs warning that he would actually carry out a shooting and his motive are focuses for investigators digging into the United States’ first campus mass shooting since the start of the school year.

Investigators from the Jackson County sheriff’s department interviewed the Grays in May 2023 after receiving a tip from the FBI about a threat posted in a Discord channel. Both Grays told investigators they had no connection to the Discord account on which the threats were made.

Brandy Rickaba and her daughter Emilie pray during a candlelight vigil for the victims of the shooting.Credit: AP

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.

“This case was worked, and at the time the boy was 13, and it wasn’t enough to substantiate,” Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said in an interview. “If we get a judge’s order or we charge somebody, we take firearms for safekeeping.”

Colt Gray was taken into custody shortly after the shooting. He will be charged and tried as an adult, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said.

Colt was being held without bond at Gainesville Regional Youth Detention Centre, Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice communications director Glenn Allen said on Thursday.

His arraignment is set for Friday morning before a Georgia Superior Court judge in Barrow County by video camera.

In Colt’s bedroom, authorities found documents they believe he wrote referring to past school shootings, including the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation told CNN.

A portrait of Colt’s tumultuous family life, revealed in a CNN review of court and law enforcement records, social media posts and an interview with his grandfather showed that his parents went through a bitter separation and custody dispute in recent years.

They called law enforcement on each other, the family was evicted from at least one home, and Gray’s mother was arrested for keying her husband’s car and drug possession, law enforcement records show, according to a CNN report.

Colt’s mother and maternal grandfather accused the teenager’s father of being verbally abusive towards his family for years, CNN reported.

“He was just a good kid, but he lived in an environment that was hostile,” Charles Polhamus said of Colt, his grandson, in an interview with CNN. “His dad beat up on him, I mean, I’m not talking about physical, but screaming and hollering, and he did the same thing to my daughter.”

Officials identified those killed as two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and two teachers, Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53. One teacher and eight students wounded in the attack remained in hospital, MSNBC reported on Thursday.

The shooting revived both the national debate about gun control and the outpouring of grief that follows in a country where such attacks occur with regularity.

People in Winder, a city of 18,000 about 80 kilometres north-east of Atlanta, gathered on Wednesday night in a park for a prayer vigil for the victims.

Schermerhorn was an upbeat teenager who liked visiting Disney World, where his family was going on vacation soon, friends of his family told The New York Times. His mother told an Atlanta news channel that he had autism.

Friends of Angulo said he loved to make people laugh.

“He was a very good kid and very sweet and so caring,” wrote Lisette Angulo, who identified herself as the victim’s oldest sister on a fundraising page she created to cover his funeral costs. “He was so loved by many.”

Along with teaching maths, Aspinwall was the football team’s defensive co-ordinator. He described himself as a “husband to a beautiful wife and dad to 2 amazing girls” on his X account, where he posted often about football and shared pictures of his family.

Irimie also taught maths at the school. A friend told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she emigrated from Romania in the 1990s and was active in the expatriate community in Georgia, teaching traditional dances to children in her spare time.

The shooting was the first planned attack at a school this autumn, said David Riedman, who runs the K-12 School Shooting Database. Apalachee students returned to school last month; many other students in the US are returning this week.

There have been hundreds of shootings inside schools and colleges in the past two decades. The deadliest resulted in more than 30 deaths at Virginia Tech in 2007. The carnage has intensified the pitched debate over gun laws and the right granted in the US Constitution’s Second Amendment “to keep and bear arms”.

Reuters

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