Mother of Georgia suspect called school minutes before shooting, family says

Mourners form a prayer circle at a makeshift memorial at the flagpole, where the flags were flying at half staff, outside Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., on Sept. 6, 2024. The mother of the 14-year-old boy charged with fatally shooting four people at his Georgia high school this week has told relatives that she had called the school on the morning on the attack, warning of an “extreme emergency,” her sister said on Saturday. (Christian Monterrosa/The New York Times)

By Richard Fausset and Rick Rojas

The mother of the 14-year-old boy charged with fatally shooting four people at his Georgia high school this past week told relatives that she had called the school on the morning of the attack, warning of an “extreme emergency,” her sister said Saturday.

Officials said the suspect, Colt Gray, opened fire Wednesday morning on the campus of Apalachee High School in Winder, killing two students and two teachers and injuring nine others. Authorities said reports of a shooting came in about 10:20 a.m. But the suspect’s mother, Marcee Gray, had apparently called the school at 9:50 a.m., said her sister, Annie Brown.

It was unclear what in particular led the mother to call the school that morning.

The emergence of the possible alert from the suspect’s mother intensifies the scrutiny now applied to his family, school officials and law enforcement officials about missed opportunities to heed warning signs and intervene before the attack.

Marcee Gray told Brown in a text message after the shooting that she had notified a counselor at the school, Brown said. The phone call to the school was first reported Saturday by The Washington Post, which cited Brown, text messages and a call log from the family’s shared phone plan that documented a 10-minute phone call from the mother’s number to the school.

Brown confirmed the details of the Post’s reporting to The New York Times on Saturday evening. And a federal law enforcement official confirmed that the mother had called the school shortly before the shooting.

A spokesperson for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which has been handling the investigation, declined to comment Saturday. Jud Smith, the sheriff for Barrow County, where the shooting occurred, did not immediately reply to messages seeking comment, nor did officials from the Barrow County School System.

The FBI said hours after the shooting that it had referred a threat of a school shooting made online more than a year ago to a local sheriff’s office, whose investigators traced it to the suspect, who was then 13.

At the time, in May 2023, the suspect denied making the posts in a chat group on Discord, a social media platform, and suggested that his account could have been hacked.

The sheriff’s investigators from Jackson County, which neighbors Winder, and which was where the suspect and his family had previously lived, found they could not definitively link him to the posts and ended the investigation. The sheriff’s office said that it had informed the middle school in Jackson County that he had attended, but school officials there denied this past week they were told of the threat.

But during that investigation, the suspect’s father, Colin Gray, described to a sheriff’s deputy the turmoil rankling 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 said he was aware the suspect “was a threat to himself and others” and still allowed him access to the military-style rifle used in the attack. Gray had given his son the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle as a Christmas gift last year, federal law enforcement officials said.

The shooting took place roughly a month into the school year at Apalachee, where the suspect had just started as a freshman. In the months before the shooting, Brown said that her nephew had begged for mental health help, contending that he had been deeply affected by the turbulence that had rocked him and his family in recent years.

During the investigation into the previous threat, Gray had told a sheriff’s deputy that his son had struggled in school. Other students at one middle school in Jackson County “just ridiculed him day after day after day,” Gray said, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by the Times this past week.

The family had been evicted from their home and the parents separated, with the suspect apparently living with his father in a new home and two younger siblings moving in with the mother at her parents’ house in Fitzgerald, Georgia, which was several hours away.

Marcee Gray pleaded guilty in December to charges of criminal damage to property and “criminal trespass/family violence.” She was ordered to pay damages to a construction company where Colin Gray had worked and was forbidden from having direct contact with her estranged husband, court records show.

She had also been arrested in November on suspicion of possessing small amounts of methamphetamine, fentanyl and muscle relaxants, according to arrest warrants. But court records indicate that she was not charged with drug possession.

Marcee Gray declined to talk when a reporter knocked on her door Thursday. Efforts to talk to the suspect’s father after the shooting were also unsuccessful. Colin Gray was charged Thursday night.

The next morning, he made his initial appearance in court, sitting before the same judge who had told his son minutes earlier that, if convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.