Apalachee school shooting: Sheriff releases 2023 body camera footage of Colt, Colin Gray interview

WINDER, Ga. — The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office has released the body camera video of a deputy’s visit to the home of Colin and Colt Gray from 2023.

The video, according to WSB, showed Colt Gray, who was 13 at the time, appearing nervous and repeatedly telling the investigator that he did not make threats on a Discord server.

Colt Gray was questioned about allegedly writing on the chat board that he was going to “shoot up a middle school tomorrow” more than a year ago.

WSB reported earlier, “Colt expressed concern that someone is accusing him of threatening to shoot up a school, stating that he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” the Jackson County sheriff’s incident report said.

No arrests were made at the time because of “inconsistent information” on the Disord account, The Associated Press reported. The account had information written in Russian and digital fingerprints based in various cities inside and outside Georgia. Colt Gray said he had stopped using it a few months prior to the investigation because his account had been hacked.

The sheriff’s investigators told the FBI at the time that it did alert local schools and would continue to monitor Colt Gray, but the sheriff told ABC News that her office “probably” dropped the ball.

Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said the FBI informed her that the alleged Apalachee shooter was the same teen her office questioned last year. Despite saying that local schools had been notified last year, Mangum, said after “speaking with Dr. Donna McMullan with the Jefferson City Schools On September 5, 2024, it came to my attention they had no record of being notified of a threat by Colt Gray who was enrolled there.”

So did Mangum think her office dropped the ball? When asked by ABC News, she said, not on the investigation itself, which she said was “done thoroughly.”

“But on notifying the school, probably,” adding “because I don’t know. If you say area schools are notified, who did you talk to and what school did you talk to? I don’t know.”

All she said she has is an email sent to the FBI by the now-former captain telling the federal authorities that schools were notified, but she doesn’t know if calls were made to the school instead of doing everything in writing.

Mangum also told ABC News that the personnel who had worked on the previous allegations had left her office a week before the shooting.

Colt Gray was charged last week as an adult on four counts of felony murder with more charges pending. Colin Gray is also facing charges including four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children in the second degree. Law enforcement said Colin Gray bought his son the AR-style gun in December for a Christmas gift, CNN reported.

Four people were killed in last week’s shooting — two students: Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo and two teachers: Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie — and nine others were wounded.

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