After a 14-year-old student opened fire on his schoolmates with an AR-15–style rifle in rural Georgia on September 4, reporters and investigators have focused on the role of his parents in the months leading up to that morning. The shooter, Colt Gray, has been charged with four counts of murder in the deaths of his classmates at Apalachee High School, which is outside Athens. (Seven others were shot, and two others sustained other injuries, but they are expected to survive). Though he has appeared in court, he hasn’t entered a plea.
Family members have described a home life defined by abuse, neglect, drug use, and deadly access to a cache of weapons. At least two of Colt’s family members were aware of the boy’s allegedly abusive living situation and troubled home life. Here’s what we know about his family leading up to the shooting and after.
Colt Gray’s mother reportedly tried to stop the shooting
On the morning of September 4, Marcee Gray, 43, received a text from her son that read “I’m sorry, mom,” according to a CNN interview with the shooter’s grandfather, Charles Polhamus, who saw the message. Phone records reportedly show that Marcee called the school and warned administrators of an “extreme emergency” around 9:50 a.m., about a half-hour before the shooting. At some point that morning, Marcee drove roughly 200 miles north across the state from Fitzgerald, where she was staying, to Winder, where the boy was living with his father. It’s not clear if she left before or after reports of the shooting surfaced.
Marcee was a graduate of Georgia Southern University in 2005, a self-described “#sciencenerd” who worked for local manufacturing plants like Toyota. Last fall, she posted on LinkedIn that “after 14yrs of almost constant domestic abuse, I packed myself and my babies up and relocated to my hometown in south GA,” adding that she was suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the Washington Post, state courts separated Marcee from her children just a few months later, after she pleaded guilty to a charge of family violence. “There were nights where the mom would lock him and his sister out the house. And they would be banging on the back door, just screaming like ‘Mom! Mom! Mom!’ and crying. It was absolutely devastating,” a neighbor, Lauren Vickers, told the New York Post.
Marcee’s sister, Annie Brown, has said that Colt “was begging for help from everybody around him,” and that he was suffering from unspecified mental-health problems, according to ABC. That report also said that Marcee’s mother had visited the school the week before the shooting to set up therapy sessions for the boy.
Marcee has been arrested multiple times during the last 17 years on accusations of “domestic violence, drug possession, property damage and traffic violations,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newspaper also reported that she was jailed in April over a civil fraud claim related to a vehicle purchase. She has not been charged in connection with the shooting.
The shooter’s father allegedly gave him the gun
Colin Gray, the 54-year-old father of the shooter, was arrested on September 5 and charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced on X. At the heart of the charges is the semi-automatic weapon that Colin had given to his son for Christmas, around the time that his mother was forcibly removed from the home — and reminiscent of what led to James and Jennifer Crumbly’s April conviction. “He knowingly allowed his son, Colt, to have the weapon,” the law-enforcement agency alleged.
Colin appears to have grown up in an abusive household. “From my husband’s first memory, all he knew was abuse,” Marcee wrote in a 2022 Facebook post. “Severe physical abuse (I’m talking everything from getting a broken arm at age 8 while he was totally asleep to having a barstool crack his skull open … I still rub my fingers across the scar/gouge on his scalp and think to myself ‘How?! I can’t even comprehend it!’ … that is what substance abuse can do.”
In an interview with the New York Post, Polhamus said that Colin Gray had developed a substance-abuse problem after suffering from a back injury, which ultimately led to him losing his farm. “Spending 11 years with that son of a bitch screaming and hollering every day — it can affect anybody,” Polhamus told the New York Post, adding that the father was “evil” and his family “coudn’t, they didn’t survive in it.” He added that he wanted his son-in-law to get the death penalty after conviction.
In May 2023, the FBI Atlanta Field Office received information about Colt Gray, then 13, making online threats about a school shooting. The FBI referred the matter to the Jackson County sheriff’s office, which interviewed the boy and his father. According to the FBI, “the father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online.” Law-enforcement officials left without making an arrest since they claimed they did not have probable cause under Georgia law, though the school was later warned. (It is unclear why Georgia police did not pursue the case further. After another teenage boy made similar threats at a different school in the state the day after the Apalachee shooting, the boy was charged with making “felony terroristic threats.”)
This incident would play a major role in the charges against Colin Gray. A warrant for his arrest states that he gave his son the gun “knowing he posed a danger to himself and others,” according to a local news station. It is not clear what Colin knew in the days leading up to the shooting, or where he was that morning. He now faces a 180-year sentence.
