Georgia school shooter Colt Gray was bullied by classmates who called him gay, his father told detectives in an interview last year.
Colin Gray, 54, made the claims when he was interviewed by the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office after the FBI received a tip that his son had threatened to shoot up his high school.
“It was very difficult for him to go to school and not be bothered,” Colin Gray told an investigator, according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by DailyMail.com.
The father added: “It went from one thing to another… I was trying to get him on the golf team… (they were like) Oh, look, Colt’s gay. He’s dating this guy. They ridiculed him day after day.”
Gray, 14, is charged as an adult in the deaths of Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. Nine people were also injured in Wednesday’s attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, outside Atlanta.
Georgia school shooter Colt Gray was bullied by classmates who called him gay, his father told detectives in an interview last year.
“It was very difficult for him to go to school and not be picked on,” Colin Gray told an investigator, according to a transcript of their conversation obtained by DailyMail.com.
He and his father appeared in back-to-back hearings Friday morning with about 50 spectators in the courtroom. The elder Gray is also charged in connection with the shooting, including charges of involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder.
The teenager appeared in person in court in shackles, wearing a green T-shirt and grey tracksuit bottoms. He kept his head down, his hair covering his face, and spoke quietly only to Judge Currie Mingledorff, answering “yes, sir” when asked to confirm his name.
Meanwhile, his father wept as he appeared shortly after his son in the same courtroom, charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two of second-degree murder and eight of cruelty to children.
Judge Mingledorff called Gray to correct a statement he had made, telling him, “I wanted to make it clear to you that the penalty does not include death, but rather life imprisonment with or without the possibility of parole.”
The elder Gray is also charged in connection with the shooting, including charges of second-degree manslaughter and murder. He will be seen in court on Friday.
His father, Colin Gray, 54, is accused of buying his 14-year-old son Colt the AR-15-style rifle the boy used and was arrested Thursday on multiple counts of second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children.
A 2005 Supreme Court decision bans the execution of criminals who were under 18 when they committed their crimes.
The teen denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when authorities interviewed him last year about a threatening social media post, according to the sheriff’s report.
According to the report, conflicting evidence about the post’s origin left investigators unable to make any arrests. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and found nothing to warrant filing charges at the time.
The teen was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Gray, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a high school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video game players, according to the sheriff’s office incident report.
According to the report, the FBI’s lead pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to Colt Gray. But the boy said he would “never say something like that, even in jest,” according to the investigator’s report.
The transcript of the interview quotes the teen as saying, “I promise I would never say anything where…”, with the rest of the denial rendered inaudible.
The investigator wrote that no arrests were made due to “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a trail of digital evidence indicating it had been accessed in different cities in Georgia, as well as in Buffalo, New York.
Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and found nothing to warrant filing charges at that time.
“We didn’t fail at any point,” Mangum told The Associated Press in an interview. “We did everything we could with what we had at the time.”
The Discord account had a username written in Russian, and the translation of the letters spelled out the name Lanza, a reference to Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, officials said.
Gray denied being the author of the threats and told police he had closed his Discord account after being repeatedly hacked. He expressed concern that someone might make such accusations about him.
“He knows the severity of guns and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,” the father, Colin Gray, said, according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff’s office.
Sheriff’s investigators closed the case after failing to prove Gray was logged into the Discord account and finding no grounds to seek the warrant needed to seize the family’s guns, according to police reports released by the sheriff’s office Thursday.
The boy reportedly had an obsession with other infamous school shooters, such as Parkland, Florida, killer Nikolas Cruz.
