Georgia high school shooting suspect charged with 4 counts of murder
ATLANTA (WANF/Gray News) - The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Thursday that the suspect in Wednesday’s deadly school shooting in Georgia has been charged with four counts of felony murder.
Colt Gray, 14, is the suspect in the Apalachee High School shooting that left two students and two teachers dead and nine others hospitalized.
He will appear in court Friday at 8:30 a.m.
On Thursday, the GBI said the autopsies of the four shooting victims is being performed today at its medical examiner’s office.
Police said Gray will tried as an adult. He has been booked in the Gainesville Regional Youth Detention Center.
The FBI said they believe the alleged shooter at a high school in Winder, Georgia, was accused of making an online threat in May 2023.
The FBI said its National Threat Operations Center got several anonymous tips from users of the social media site Discord about “online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time.”
The teen, now 14, is being held in the Gainesville Regional Youth Detention Center, accused of killing two students and two teachers, and hurting nine other people at Apalachee High School on Wednesday morning.
The teen is expected to appear in court on Friday.
A Jackson County deputy looked into the May 2023 tip from the FBI about a threat to shoot up a middle school, WANF reported.
The FBI said the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office found a possible suspect, a 13-year-old boy, later identified as Colt Gray, who was interviewed, along with his father.
The report states Gray “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.”
Gray’s father said there were hunting rifles in the home and that Gray was “allowed to use them when supervised but does not have unfettered access to them.”
The incident report states that the FBI tip was reviewed further on May 23. Tips were received from several IP addresses, but the exact location was unclear.
The report states the tip included user information on the Discord account, and that the email associated with it belonged to Gray. It also says that the account was created on April 2, which falls outside the time frame Gray said he deleted his account.
The report states there was “inconsistent information” in the tip. IP addresses show the Discord account was used in Fort Valley and Statesboro, but also in Buffalo, N.Y., and northern Virginia. The Discord account name was also in Russian, and the phone number on the account was listed as a LaGrange phone number.
A translation of the Russian letters spelled out “Lanza,” which investigators believed referred to Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter.
A deputy spoke to Gray and his father once again. Gray told authorities he stopped using his Discord account because “too many people kept hacking his account and he was afraid someone would use his information for nefarious purposes.”
The father and son also told the deputy they did not know the email address or speak Russian.
“At this time, due to the inconsistent nature of the information received by the FBI, the allegation that Colt or (his father) is the user behind the Discord account that made the threat cannot be substantiated,” the report states.
In a Wednesday night press conference, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation identified the slain students at Apalachee High School as 14-year-olds Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo and the slain teachers as Christina Irimie, 53, and Richard Aspinwall, 39.
The agency said nine other victims – eight students and one teacher – were taken to area hospitals. At least six of the victims, including two who were shot, were taken to a Northeast Georgia Medical Center campus, according to hospital officials. The two people shot did not have life-threatening injuries, officials said.
Armed with an assault-style rifle, the teen turned the gun on students in a hallway at the school when classmates refused to open the door for him to return to his algebra classroom, classmate Lyela Sayarath said, the Associated Press reported.
The teen earlier left the second period algebra classroom, and Sayarath figured the quiet student who recently transferred was skipping school again.
But he returned later and wanted back in the classroom. Some students went to open the locked door but instead backed away.
“I’m guessing they saw something, but for some reason, they didn’t open the door,” Sayarath said.
When she looked at him through a window in the door, she saw the student turn and heard a barrage of gunshots.
“It was about 10 or 15 of them at once, back-to-back,” she said.
The math students ducked onto the floor and sporadically crawled around, looking for a safe corner to hide.
Two school resource officers encountered the shooter within minutes after a report of shots fired went out, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said. The teen immediately surrendered and was taken into custody.
The report of an active shooting brought a large number of law enforcement officers to Apalachee High School in Barrow County shortly before 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.
The agency said the suspect will be charged with murder and tried as an adult.
Officials said an AR-platform-style gun was used.
Barrow County Schools will be closed for the remainder of the week. The county is about 40 miles northeast of Atlanta.
Apalachee High School has about 1,900 students, according to records from Georgia education officials obtained by the Associated Press.
The school became Barrow County’s second-largest public high school when it opened in 2000, according to the Barrow County School System. The school is named after the Apalachee River on the southern edge of Barrow County.
Copyright 2024 WANF via Gray Local Media, Inc. All rights reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.