Alarm bells rang more than a year ago. An FBI investigation into online threats of a school shooting, accompanied by photos of guns, led to the home of Colt Gray, the man accused of killing two teachers and two students at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. After questioning him and his father, police found no grounds to arrest him. Gray, now 14, whom a classmate described Wednesday as a quiet boy who barely spoke, is charged with murder and will be tried as an adult, according to authorities.
In May 2023, the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center received several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified time and location. The threats contained photographs of weapons. Within 24 hours, the FBI determined that the online posting had originated in Georgia. The FBI’s Atlanta office forwarded the information to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office for action, according to the FBI. They reported in a statement on Wednesday jointly by the FBI delegation in Atlanta and the sheriff’s office in that county.
Jackson County sheriff’s deputies then located a possible suspect, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. The father stated that he had hunting weapons at home, but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them. The boy denied making the online threats. Jackson County alerted local schools to continue monitoring the teen. “At this time, there was no probable cause to proceed with his arrest or to take further law enforcement action,” authorities said.
Gray’s current school is in another county, Barrow County, and apparently the information did not flow. According to local radio station WSB-TV, a neighbor of the family saw the boy take the school bus on Wednesday wearing a sweatshirt and a backpack, although his father usually drove him to school.
Eyewitnesses told local media that Gray left math class and the door to his classroom closed automatically. When he tried to return to it, one of the students inside saw that he was carrying a gun and did not open it. Shortly afterward the shooting began, apparently in a hallway of the school and an adjoining classroom. Gray used an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, according to authorities, who are still investigating how he got hold of it. Police carried out searches at the accused’s home on Wednesday.
“He never spoke”
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In an interview on CNN, Lyela Sayarath, a junior at Apalachee High School who said she sat next to the shooter, described him as a “quiet kid” who had recently transferred to the school and often skipped class. “He never really talked. He was pretty quiet. Most of the time he wasn’t there — he just didn’t come to school or skipped class. But even when he did talk, it was one-word answers or just short sentences,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you what his voice sounded like or even describe his face. He was just there.”
Sayarath said he wasn’t surprised that he was the shooter. “When you think about shooters and how they act or the things they do, it’s usually the quiet guy or that’s the stereotype, and he was the one that fit that description in our class,” he said.
Little further information has emerged about the alleged perpetrator of the massacre. It is not known why he acted or if there was any trigger for him to carry out those threats almost a year and a half later.
According to authorities, Colt Gray surrendered to officers as soon as they arrived at the school, minutes after the alert about the presence of a shooter. Before that, he fired several shots. Two 14-year-old classmates, a male and female teacher, were killed. Nine other people were hospitalized.
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