Apalachee school shooting: Gunman also had knife, rode bus to school day of massacre

WINDER, Ga. — New details have emerged about the day a Barrow County teen went into Apalachee High School and opened fire, killing two teachers and two students.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation says Colt Gray used an AR platform-style weapon during the shooting.

New information from the agency now says he was also carrying a knife on him at the time and that he took the bus to school that morning.

The GBI said Gray had the rifle in his backpack last Wednesday, and that’s how he got it into the school.

Also, Gray had only been enrolled in the school for a few weeks. The GBI said he enrolled at Apalachee High on Aug. 14 and between that date and Sept. 4, he missed nine days of school.

Four people lost their lives in the shooting: math teachers 39-year-old Richard Aspinwall and 53-year-old Cristina Irimie and 14-year-old students Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn.

Nine others were also injured in the shooting.

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The GBI says that school resource officers encountered Gray just minutes after the shooting began. They say moments later, Gray put down his gun, got on the ground and surrendered to the school resource officers.

Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said Gray realized that if he did not surrender, he would have been shot.

He was taken into custody and is now being held in the Gainesville Regional Youth Detention Center on four counts of felony murder.

The FBI says that this is not the first time Gray has been investigated for an incident involving a school.

Channel 2 investigative reporter Justin Gray, no relation, obtained a copy of a May 2023 investigative report and audio recordings of a Jackson County Sheriff’s Office interview involving Colt Gray and his father as the then-13-year-old was being investigated for threats made against a school in Jackson County on the social media platform Discord.

They say, at that time, there was no probable cause to arrest him.

On the night of Sept. 5, his father, Colin Gray, was arrested in connection to the shooting and charged with murder, involuntary manslaughter, and cruelty to children.

The GBI said in a news conference that Colt Gray received the gun used in the shooting as a Christmas gift from his father just months after the investigation into the 2023 school threat.

Prosecutors plan to present their cases against both the father and son on Oct. 17.

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