Teen, father charged in Georgia school shooting appear in court

WINDER, Ga. – A father and son arrested after Georgia’s deadliest school shooting made their first court appearances half an hour apart Friday morning, sitting at the same defense table in the same courtroom as a list of grim charges were read against them.

The father, appearing distraught, rocked back and forth in a chair throughout his brief appearance. Family members of those killed in the shooting lined the first row of the courtroom and spilled into the second. They sat quietly, with some wiping their eyes.

The 14-year-old accused of slaying two students and two teachers Wednesday morning at Apalachee High School, where he was a freshman, faces four counts of felony murder. If convicted, he could serve life in prison, with or without parole. His father, Colin Gray, 54, who faces murder and manslaughter charges, is accused of allowing his son to have access to the military-style rifle used in the shooting despite knowing “he was a threat to himself and others,” according to arrest warrants. The gun, a black AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, was a Christmas present to the boy, Colt Gray, from his father in 2023, according to three law enforcement officials.

Father and son were both represented by public defenders, and neither entered a plea or requested bond. Preliminary hearings for both were set for Dec. 4.

The teenager’s hearing in the courtroom in Winder, Georgia, lasted less than 10 minutes. The boy, whose face was not visible to cameras because of rules involving minors, briefly answered procedural questions from Judge Currie M. Mingledorff II before he was escorted out. He was shackled and wore a green T-shirt with khaki pants and boots. Not long after, the judge brought the teenager back into the courtroom to tell him that because he was a minor, he would not face the death penalty.

The students who died in the shooting Wednesday morning were Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, officials said. The educators who were killed, both math teachers, were Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie. Nine other people were hospitalized with injuries; from which officials have said they are expected to recover.

Colin Gray was arrested Thursday and charged with second-degree murder and other crimes in connection with the attack. Mingledorff told Gray that the maximum penalty for the charges against him, which include involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children, would add up to 180 years in prison.

It’s rare for parents of shooting suspects to be charged with crimes, but prosecutors have shown a growing willingness to try to hold them responsible in high-profile cases. This year, the parents of a teenage school shooter in Michigan were convicted of manslaughter. The couple, James and Jennifer Crumbley, were the first parents in the country to be directly charged for the deaths caused by their child in a mass shooting.

In Georgia on Wednesday, the school went into lockdown at the sound of gunshots. The locked classroom doors, as well as a newly installed alarm system, may have helped to prevent further bloodshed, officials said.

Some students said they had huddled quietly in their classrooms for more than an hour, and many left their phones behind when they eventually evacuated to the school’s football field, making it hard for them to connect with anxious family members. Traffic snarled around the school as parents scrambled to find their children.

The suspect surrendered to school resource officers and was taken into custody, law enforcement officials said. Police have found evidence that he was interested in mass shootings, particularly the 2018 massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation.

Relatives suggested that he had a troubled home life. Charlie Polhamus, the teenager’s maternal grandfather, said he believed his grandson was responsible for what happened but also cast some of the blame on the tumult in the teenager’s life with his father, who had split from his wife.

“My grandson did what he did because of the environment that he lived in,” Polhamus said.

The Grays had been investigated by law enforcement officials before. In May 2023, FBI officials were alerted to some disturbing messages on Discord, a social media platform: Someone in a chat group had threatened to possibly “shoot up a middle school.”

A report from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, obtained by The New York Times, said that an email associated with the Discord user who had made the threat belonged to Colt Gray. The report detailed how investigators looked into it but were unable to definitively link the threats to the boy, then 13, who denied that he had made the post.

At the time, Colin Gray told an investigator that he and his wife were no longer together and that they had been evicted from their home, according to a transcript of a May 2023 interview obtained by the Times. Records from that eviction show that Gray owned a black AR-15 at the time, as well as several other guns.

The father told investigators that he had hunting rifles in his house but that his son did not have “unfettered” access to them.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.