The mother of the 14-year-old boy accused of shooting four people at his Georgia high school this week told relatives she called the school the morning of the attack and warned of an “extreme emergency,” her sister said Saturday.
Officials said the suspect, Colt Gray, opened fire on the campus of Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, on Wednesday morning, killing two students and two teachers and wounding nine others. Authorities said reports of the shooting came in around 10:20 a.m. However, the suspect's mother, Marcee Gray, apparently called the school at 9:50 a.m., her sister, Annie Brown, said.
It was unclear what exactly prompted the mother to call the school that morning.
The emergence of the possible warning from the suspect's mother adds to the criticism now being directed at his family, school officials and police officers for missed opportunities to heed warning signs and intervene before the attack.
After the shooting, Gray texted Ms. Brown that she had notified a school counselor, Brown said. The Washington Post first reported on the call to the school on Saturday, citing Ms. Brown, text messages and a call log from the family's shared phone plan that documented a 10-minute call from the mother's number to the school.
Ms. Brown confirmed the details of the Post's reporting to The New York Times on Saturday evening. And a federal agent confirmed that the mother had called the school shortly before the shooting.
A spokeswoman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is leading the investigation, declined to comment Saturday. Jud Smith, the sheriff of Barrow County, Georgia, where the shooting occurred, did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did officials with the Barrow County school system.
The FBI said a few hours after the shooting that it had forwarded a school shooting threat made online over a year ago to the local sheriff's office. FBI investigators were able to trace the threat back to the then 13-year-old suspect.
At the time, in May 2023, the suspect denied making the posts in a chat group on the social media platform Discord and suspected that his account might have been hacked.
Sheriff's investigators in Jackson County, which borders Winder and where the suspect and his family had previously lived, could not conclusively link him to the posts and closed the investigation. The sheriff's office said it had notified the middle school in Jackson County where he had attended, but school officials there denied this week that they had learned of the threat.
But during that investigation, the suspect's father, Colin Gray, described to a deputy sheriff the turmoil that was rocking his son's life at home and at school.
Gray, 54, has now been charged with murder and manslaughter in connection with the shooting because authorities say he knew the suspect posed “a threat to himself and others” and yet gave him access to the military-style rifle used in the attack. Gray had given his son the semi-automatic AR-15 rifle for Christmas last year, federal officials said.
The shooting occurred about a month after school started in Apalachee, where the suspect was a freshman. In the months before the shooting, Ms. Brown said, her nephew had been begging for psychiatric help, deeply affected by the turmoil that had rocked him and his family in recent years.
During the investigation into the previous threat, Mr. Gray had told a deputy that his son had been having problems in school. Other students at a middle school in Jackson County “just ridiculed him day in and day out,” Mr. Gray said, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by The Times this week.
The family had been evicted from their home and the parents had separated. The suspect was apparently living with his father in a new house, while two younger siblings moved in with their mother at their parents' house in Fitzgerald, Georgia, several hours away.
Ms. Gray pleaded guilty in December to charges of criminal damage and “trespass/domestic violence.” She was ordered to pay restitution to a construction company where Mr. Gray worked and was banned from having direct contact with her estranged husband, court records show.
She was also arrested in November on suspicion of possessing small amounts of methamphetamine, fentanyl and muscle relaxants, according to arrest warrants, but court records show she was not charged with drug possession.
When a reporter knocked on her door on Thursday, Ms. Gray would not comment. Attempts to speak to the suspect's father after the shooting were also unsuccessful. Charges were filed against Mr. Gray on Thursday evening.
The next morning, he appeared in court for the first time and sat before the same judge who had told his son just minutes earlier that if convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Adam Goldman and Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon contributed to this report.
