BARROW COUNTY, Ga. — Colt Gray, the teenager accused of killing four people and wounding nine more inside Apalachee High School, will remain in custody.
The 14-year-old brought an AR platform-style weapon into the Barrow County school on Wednesday morning and opened fire shortly before 10:30 a.m., according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Four people lost their lives: math teachers 39-year-old Richard Aspinwall and 53-year-old Cristina Irimie and 14-year-old students Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn.
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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.
Sheriff Smith says investigators have been interviewing Gray and his answers are “helping our investigation.”
He says they are still working on learning how he got the gun into the school.
The FBI says that this is not the first time Gray has been investigated for an incident involving a school.
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Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Justin Gray 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 Thursday night, 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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