Mom of suspect in Georgia school shooting indicted and is accused of taping a parent to a chair

FITZGERALD, Ga. (AP) — The mother of a Georgia teenager charged with fatally shooting four people at his high school has been indicted in connection with an alleged domestic incident last year.

The indictment handed down Monday (Sept. 16, 2024) charges Marcee Gray, 43, with exploiting an elderly person and other crimes in Ben Hill County, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. It appears unrelated to the school shootings at Apalachee High School, which occurred in a different Georgia county nearly 200 miles (320 kilometers) away.

Gray is the mother of 14-year-old Colt Gray, who was charged with murder after surrendering to police at the high school on Sept. 4. Authorities say the boy brought an assault-style rifle to school in his backpack and opened fire during morning classes, killing two students and two teachers and injuring nine others.

The indictment charging Marcee Gray stems from a domestic incident late last year, the Atlanta newspaper reported. It said a police incident report states Gray’s 74-year-old mother told authorities Nov. 4 that Gray had taken her phone, taped her to a chair and left her for nearly a full day.

The incident report said Gray bound her mother before traveling to Barrow County to confront her ex-husband, who lived with their son and two other children. The Atlanta newspaper said records show Gray was arrested in Barrow County on Nov. 6, two days after her mother was found and was sentenced to 45 days in jail after pleading guilty to charges of criminal trespassing, using a license plate to disguise her car and causing property damage.

Messages left Saturday at possible phone numbers for Gray were not immediately returned. It was not immediately known if she had an attorney.

Gray has said she called her son’s high school the morning of the shootings to warn the staff after Colt Gray sent her a text message saying, “I’m sorry.” Days later, she issued a statement saying her son “is not a monster.”

The teenager’s father, Colin Gray, has also been charged with involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children. Authorities say he gave his son access to the rifle used in the shootings.

ATLANTA (AP) — The mother of a student at the Georgia high school where a teen allegedly killed four people says information indicating staff were warned he was having a crisis shows the shooting could have been prevented. Rabecca Sayarath says administrators at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, didn’t do enough to protect students. She said Sunday (Sept. 8, 2024) that “the school failed them.” Sayarath’s daughter says administrators appeared to be looking for Colt Gray, the 14-year-old charged with four counts of murder, before the gunfire began. Others are declining to blame school or law enforcement. Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia said Sunday that he won’t “referee or second-guess” the response.

ATLANTA (AP) — The mother of a student at the Georgia high school where a teen allegedly killed four people says information indicating staff were warned he was having a crisis shows the shooting could have been prevented.

“The school failed them, that they could have prevented these deaths and they didn’t,” Rabecca Sayarath said Sunday (Sept. 8, 2024) in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “I truly, truly feel that way.”

Sayarath’s daughter, Lyela, told reporters on Wednesday, the day of the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, that administrators appeared to be looking for Colt Gray, the 14-year-old who has been charged with four counts of murder, before the gunfire began.

Others, though, are declining to blame school or law enforcement officials.

“I’m not going to referee or second-guess what happened with the authorities the other night,” U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I applaud our first responders. When others are running away from danger, they run toward the danger in order to do the best they can.”

Officials say Gray shot and killed students Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. Eight other students and a teacher were injured — seven of them shot — and are expected to recover.

Annie Brown told The Washington Post that her sister, Colt Gray’s mother, texted her saying she spoke with a school counselor and warned staff of an “extreme emergency” before the killings. Brown said Marcee Gray urged them to “immediately” find her son to check on him.

Brown provided screen shots of the text exchange to the newspaper, which also reported that a call log from the family’s shared phone plan showed a call was made to the school at 9:50 a.m. Warrants for Gray’s arrest say the shooting started at 10:20 a.m.

Brown confirmed the reporting to The Associated Press on Saturday in text messages but declined to provide further comment.

Marcee Gray expressed remorse for the shootings Saturday to The Washington Post and The New York Post.

“I am so, so sorry and can not fathom the pain and suffering they are going through right now,” Gray told The Washington Post in a text.

“It’s horrible. It’s absolutely horrible,” Gray told The New York Post outside her father’s home in Fitzgerald, Georgia, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) south of Atlanta.

Charles Polhamus, the boy’s grandfather, has told multiple news outlets that Marcee Gray got a text from her son on Wednesday saying he was sorry. Polhamus told CNN that Marcee Gray drove to Winder, more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) from Fitzgerald, immediately after the shooting.

The Washington Post also reported that texts show relatives contacted the school about the boy’s mental health a week before the shooting, and that Brown told a relative he was having “homicidal and suicidal thoughts.” The newspaper reported that the teen’s grandmother, Deborah Polhamus, met with a school counselor to request help.

The boy “starts with the therapist tomorrow,” Polhamus wrote in a text to Brown after that meeting.

Investigators haven’t said what they believe might have motivated Gray or whether they believe he targeted particular victims.

Authorities have said Gray’s father, Colin Gray, gave him access to the semiautomatic AR-15 style rifle used in the shooting. It’s not clear how Gray brought the gun to campus or what he did with it in the two hours between school starting at 8:15 a.m. and when shots first rang out.

Colin Gray became the first parent of a school shooting suspect to be charged in Georgia, District Attorney Brad Smith said Friday. He’s accused of second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children for providing his son with the rifle.

Colin Gray is jailed in Barrow County after declining to seek bail in a brief court hearing Friday in Winder. Colt Gray is being held in a juvenile detention center after declining to seek bail. Neither has been indicted or entered a plea.

Lyela Sayarath said Wednesday that Colt Gray had left her algebra classroom and that she believed he was skipping class.

In the minutes before the shooting, a female administrator came to her class looking for a student with the same last name and almost identical first name as Gray, she said. That other student was in the bathroom, but the administrator demanded to see his bag. That student returned with his bag moments later, Sayarath said, and told her that administrators had concluded he wasn’t the student they were looking for.

Someone also called the teacher on the intercom, apparently asking about Gray, Sayarath said. She said as the intercom buzzed a second time, the teacher responded, “Oh he’s here,” seeing Gray outside the classroom door.

When students went to open the door, which automatically locks from the inside when closed, Sayarath said they backed away. She said she saw Colt Gray turn away through the window of the door and then she said she heard gunshots — “10 or 15 of them at once, back-to-back.”

Rabecca Sayarath, Lyela’s mother, has said she believed the school erred by sending an unarmed administrator to look for Colt Gray instead of one of Apalachee High’s armed school resource officers.

When she questioned Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith about her daughter’s account at a Wednesday night news conference, Smith cautioned, “With all due respect, ma’am, I think your information is incorrect.”

It’s unclear if Barrow County school authorities knew before the shooting that Colt and Colin Gray previously had been interviewed by a sheriff’s deputy in neighboring Jackson County in May 2023 after a report of an online threat to shoot up a middle school that Colt Gray, then 13, attended.

Colt Gray told the deputy that “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” according to a report filed by investigators. No action was taken because of inconsistent information about the social media account used to make the threats.

Colin Gray told the investigator back then that Colt had access to unloaded guns in the house but knew “how to use them and not use them.” He also said his son had struggled since he and his wife separated and that Colt was picked on in school.

Nicole Valles, a spokesperson for the Barrow County school district, declined to comment Sunday in response to emailed questions seeking more details about what may have happened before the shooting.

“Because this is an active investigation and now court proceedings have begun, we are not commenting on specific details,” Valles wrote, referring questions to the district attorney.

Smith didn’t immediately respond to emails Sunday with similar questions, while the Georgia Bureau of Investigation referred requests for comment to the district attorney.

WINDER, Ga. (AP) — The teen charged with opening fire at a Georgia high school denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when police interviewed him last year about a menacing post on the social media site Discord. That’s according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday (Sept. 5, 2024) by The Associated Press. The report said conflicting evidence on the post’s origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone. The 14-year-old suspect was charged as an adult in the shooting Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta. Four people were killed and nine wounded. The suspect is accused of using an assault-style rifle to kill two students and two teachers in the hallway outside his algebra classroom.

WINDER, Ga. (AP) — The teen charged with opening fire at a Georgia high school denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when police interviewed him last year about a menacing post on the social media site Discord, according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday (Sept. 5, 2024).

Conflicting evidence on the post’s origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report said.

The 14-year-old suspect has been charged as an adult in the shooting Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta that killed four people and wounded nine. He is accused of using an assault-style rifle to kill two students and two teachers in the hallway outside his algebra classroom.

The same teenager was interviewed in May 2023 by a sheriff’s investigator from neighboring Jackson County who received a tip from the FBI that the boy, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the Jackson County sheriff’s report obtained by The Associated Press.

The FBI’s tip pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to the Georgia teen, the report said. But the boy told a sheriff’s investigator “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner.”

The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a digital evidence trail indicating it had been accessed in different Georgia cities as well as Buffalo, New York.

The attack Thursday was the latest among dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have set off fervent debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to active-shooter drills. But there has been little change to national gun laws.

Classes were canceled Thursday at the Georgia high school, though some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with heads bowed.

“I’m upset, I’m crying constantly,” said Linda Carter, who was shaken by the rampage even though she has no children who attend the school. “These kids shouldn’t have lost their lives. These parents, these adults, these teachers should not have lost their lives yesterday.”

When the suspect slipped out of class Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath figured her quiet classmate who recently transferred was skipping school again. But he returned later and wanted back into the room. 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.

The teen then turned the gun on people in a hallway, authorities said.

He has been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey.

The teen was to be taken Thursday to a regional youth detention facility.

When the teen was not allowed back into his classroom, Sayarath said she heard a barrage of 10 to 15 gunshots. The math students fell to the floor and crawled in search of a safe corner to hide.

Two school resource officers confronted the shooter within minutes after the gunshots were reported, Hosey said. The teen immediately surrendered.

At least nine other people — eight students and one teacher at the school in Winder — were taken to hospitals. All were expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said. Authorities were still looking into how the teen obtained the gun and got it into the school with about 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of metro Atlanta’s ever-expanding sprawl.

“All the students that had to watch their teachers and their fellow classmates die, the ones that had to walk out of the school limping, that looked traumatized,” Sayarath said.

Kassidy Reed joined a steady stream of classmates seeking counseling Thursday at the school system offices. The 17-year-old senior said she struggled to sleep Wednesday night in the aftermath of the shootings.

“The first thing you wake up and think about is like, somebody lost the coach, somebody lost their dad, somebody lost their best friend,” Reed said.

Reed was taking a test Wednesday morning with a few others in a hallway when she heard gunshots just around a corner. A teacher across the hall opened a door so they could scramble inside a chemistry lab. Reed ducked under a table next to a classmate, whose cross necklace they both gripped as they prayed.

They were close enough to hear police order someone onto the ground, followed by what sounded a person being handcuffed. When officers escorted the lab students to safety, Reed said, she saw blood in the hallway and what looked like a disassembled firearm lying next to a body.

It was the 30th mass killing in the U.S. so far this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 people have died in those killings, which are defined as events in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.

Prior cases have emerged in which someone who was once on the FBI’s radar but was not arrested went on to commit violence.

A month before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at the Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018, the bureau received a warning that he had been talking about committing a mass shooting. The FBI also investigated a tip about the person later convicted in a deadly 2022 shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado.

The pattern underscores the challenges law enforcement faces in trying to determine when concerning behavior crosses into a crime. Investigators sift through tens of thousands of tips every year to try to determine which could yield a viable threat. Cases such as the Georgia school shooting prompt fresh questions about whether more intensive investigative work might have averted the violence.

The sheriff’s report says its investigator spoke to the boy and his father on May 21, 2023. The father said he had hunting guns in the house, but his son did not have unsupervised access to them.

The teenager told the investigator that he previously used a Discord account but had stopped using the platform “because too many people kept hacking his account.”

A phone number associated with the account was linked to a different person in another Georgia city, the report said. The account’s profile name, written in Russian, translated to Lanza. The investigator noted that Adam Lanza was the perpetrator of the 2012 shootings that killed 20 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The sheriff’s office alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the teen. But the investigator concluded he “could not substantiate the tip I received from the FBI to take further action.”

WINDER, Ga. (AP) — More than a year ago, tips about online posts threatening a school shooting led Georgia police to interview a 13-year-old boy, but investigators didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest. Officials say that boy opened fire Wednesday (Sept. 4, 2024) at a high school outside Atlanta and killed four people and wounded nine. The teen has been charged as an adult in the deaths of two Apalachee High School students and two teachers. At least nine other people were taken to hospitals with injuries. Officials say all are expected to survive. The teen was to be taken to a regional youth detention facility on Thursday.

WINDER, Ga. (AP) — More than a year ago, tips about online posts threatening a school shooting led Georgia police to interview a 13-year-old boy, but investigators didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest. On Wednesday (Sept. 4, 2024), that boy opened fire at his high school outside Atlanta and killed four people and wounded nine, officials said.

The teen has been charged as an adult in the deaths of Apalachee High School students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and instructors Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference.

At least nine other people — eight students and one teacher at the school in Winder, about an hour’s drive northeast of Atlanta — were taken to hospitals with injuries. All were expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.

The teen, now 14, was to be taken to a regional youth detention facility on Thursday.

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 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, Hosey said. The teen immediately surrendered and was taken into custody.

The teen had been interviewed after the FBI received anonymous tips in May 2023 about online threats to commit an unspecified school shooting, the agency said in a statement.

The FBI narrowed the threats down and referred to the case to the sheriff’s department in Jackson County, which is adjacent to Barrow County.

The sheriff’s office interviewed the then-13-year-old and his father, who said there were hunting guns in the house but the teen did not have unsupervised access to them. The teen also denied making any online threats.

The sheriff’s office alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the teen, but there was no probable cause for arrest or additional action, the FBI said.

Hosey said the state Division of Family and Children’s Services also had previous contact with the teen and will investigate whether that has any connection with the shooting. Local news outlets reported that law enforcement on Wednesday searched the teen’s family home in Bethlehem, Georgia, east of the high school.

“All the students that had to watch their teachers and their fellow classmates die, the ones that had to walk out of the school limping, that looked traumatized,” Sayarath said, “that’s the consequence of the action of not taking control.”

Authorities were still looking into how the teen obtained the gun used in the shooting and got it into the school with about 1,900 students in Barrow County, a rapidly suburbanizing area on the edge of metro Atlanta’s ever-expanding sprawl.

It was the the latest among dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut, Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have set off fervent debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to active shooter drills in classrooms. But they have done little to move the needle on national gun laws.

Before Wednesday, there had been 29 mass killings in the U.S. so far this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 people have died in those killings, which are defined as incidents in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.

On Wednesday evening, hundreds gathered in Jug Tavern Park in downtown Winder for a vigil. Volunteers handed out candles and also water, pizza and tissues. Some knelt as a Methodist minister led the crowd in prayer after a Barrow County commissioner read a Jewish prayer of mourning.

Christopher Vasquez, 15, said he attended the vigil because he needed to feel grounded and be in a safe place.

He was in band practice when the lockdown order was issued. He said it felt like a regular drill as students lined up to hide in the band closet.

“Once we heard banging at the door and the SWAT (team) came to take us out, that’s when I knew that it was serious,” he said. “I just started shaking and crying.”

He finally settled down once he was at the football stadium. “I just was praying that everyone I love was safe,” he said.