Authorities in Georgia have released video recordings of their 2023 interview with a teen who is now suspected high school shooter, and his father.
Colt Gray, the 14-year-old who authorities accuse of killing four people in a shooting last week at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, and his father Colin, answered questions from Sheriff’s deputies in May of 2023. Authorities were following up on reports from an FBI tip line that someone had posted messages threatening to commit a school shooting.
Colin Gray speaks to authorities May 21, 2023. (Jackson County Sheriff’s Office)
The FBI said the boy denied making the threats and his father said his son didn’t have “unsupervised” access to hunting guns in the house.
“I’m telling you right now, we talk about it quite a bit — all the school shootings, things that happen, ‘Hey are you getting picked on at school’ — he is. He’s getting picked on at school,” Colin Gray told officers in the video reviewed by Scripps News. “He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do and how to use them and not use them. And so it’s kind of a little bit a shock. So, in whatever y’all are telling him, please instill in him that if this, whatever or wherever this is coming from, this is no joke.”
The FBI said that immediately following the interviews, “there was no probable cause for arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels.”
The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office also said nothing had justified bringing charges against either Gray or his father in 2023.
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“We did not drop the ball at all on this,” Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum told The Associated Press. “We did all we could do with what we had at the time.”
But both of Gray’s parents had expressed concerns over their son’s struggles. His father told authorities he was bullied at school, and his mother called the school roughly half an hour before the shooting occurred to warn staff of an “extreme emergency,” urging the counselor to check on her son.
This story was originally published by Scripps News, an E.W. Scripps Company.
