 "Georgia teen school shooter’s troubled life: Dad gifted him gun for Christmas, drug-addict mother")
A regular class at Apalachee High School in Georgia’s Winder in the US turned deadly when a shooter opened fire on Wednesday.
Two students and two teachers were killed and nine others were injured.
A 14-year-old suspect, Colt Gray , whom the Georgia Bureau of Investigation identified as a student at the school, has been arrested. Authorities say he will face murder charges and be tried as an adult.
In the latest development, Gray’s father has been arrested for letting his son possess a weapon.
Several media reports have also claimed that Colt grew up in a broken and neglectful home, as his mother has a long history of drug and domestic violence arrests.
Father arrested
It’s the latest example of prosecutors holding parents responsible for their children’s actions in school shootings.
Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Direction Chris Hosey said at a news conference.
“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Hosey said, according to The Associated Press.
In Georgia, second-degree murder means that a person has caused the death of another person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. It is punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison, while malice murder and felony murder carry a minimum sentence of life. Involuntary manslaughter means that someone unintentionally caused the death of another person.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsColt Gray has a first court appearance scheduled Friday, but no proceedings were yet scheduled for his father. Neither Gray appeared in online court records for Barrow County.
A Christmas present for son
Authorities investigating the case have said that Colt used an “ AR-15 style weapon ,” or semiautomatic rifle to carry out the shooting on Wednesday, September 4.
A CNN report says that Colin purchased the gun at a local gun store as a holiday present for his son in December 2023 just seven months after authorities paid the pair a visit in May when the FBI received tips about online school shooting threats.
The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the sheriff’s office incident report.
According to AP, the FBI’s tip pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to Colt Gray, the report said.
However, the boy said, “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” per the investigator’s report.
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 teen said he stopped using the account a few months earlier after it was hacked.
A mom with multiple drug arrests
His 43-year-old mother, Marcee, has a long history of drug and domestic violence arrests spanning 17 years and four Georgia counties.
An alumnus of Georgia Southern University, she has listed her profession on LinkedIn as a “quality engineer” at a local manufacturer.
According to the New York Post citing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, her rap sheet includes domestic violence, drug possession, property damage and various traffic violations, including driving under the influence charges.
She also reportedly faced civil fraud charges over the purchase of a used vehicle, and was locked up in Ben Hill County as recently as April.
As per her social media accounts and neighbours, Marcee later left the family home.
Lauren Vickers, who lived next-door to the Grays in Jefferson, Georgia, told the New York Post that in the neighbourhood, it was the mom who drew the most attention.
“I would find her in the driveway, passed out, with the car running and blaring music early in the morning,” Vickers said, adding, “She would have taken the little one (Gray’s younger brother) to daycare or pre-K. She was driving him like that.”
‘Unspecified mental health issues’
Colt’s aunt, Annie Brown, told the Washington Post that her nephew was struggling with mental health issues.
According to her, he had been “begging for help from everybody around him” months before the massacre.
“The adults around him failed him,” she said.
Brown even took to her Facebook profile to defend her nephew, according to Hindustan Times, “I will take care of my nephew and what he needs on this side. Just check yourself before you speak about a child that never asked to deal with the bull**** he saw on a daily basis.”
The Florida resident didn’t go into further detail about the problem or the alleged issues the youngster was facing before the fatal shooting.
‘A broken home’
The Post, citing the family’s former neighbour, claimed that Colt was raised in a broken and negligent environment that social services and the police frequently visited.
Vickers claimed that when the Grays and their three kids moved into the neat neighbourhood 60 miles east of Atlanta in 2022, there were “problems immediately.”
“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,” she said.
“No clean clothes, I’m not exaggerating.”
“It was constant abuse,” she said. “It’s very, very sad.”
She claimed that although Colt didn’t say much, she would frequently witness him missing school, meandering around the woods, and staying in the unfinished homes in the neighbourhood.
Recounting calling child services several times, Vickers said, “They came, talked to me, and did nothing.”
According to a former unidentified landlord, Marcee was “a f*** up,” while the father was “trying his best to be a stand-up guy.”
“She was locking them out in inclement weather. Freezing weather,” he told The Post..
He claimed that once neighbours began to complain, he went over to talk to Colin at the house.
“The neighbours reported (Marcee) was driving down the street in her car, drunk, fell out the car, with the door open and the engine running. As a landlord, I can’t tolerate this kind of behavior in a neighborhood where a tenant might be putting other children at risk,” he said, adding, “I spoke to the husband and asked him, ‘do you know your children are being locked out of the house?’”
According to the landlord, Colin informed him that Marcee was facing drug and alcohol addiction and that their divorce was imminent.
After that, he terminated her from the lease and reported her to the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, leaving Colin to fend for himself until he eventually moved out of his own free will.
“I think the man really went through it. I can’t imagine he didn’t seek help for these children because they had been quite traumatized,” the landlord told The Post.
It seemed to him that Colt “really wanted to be with his father,” even if he and Colt never spoke.
The school shooting
Father and son have been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, according to Hosey.
The shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, about an hour’s drive from Atlanta, was the latest among dozens of school shootings across the US in recent years.
This includes especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas.
According to CNN, which cited the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, when the shooting began, several teachers signalled for assistance by pushing alert buttons on their badges, which were new and had just been given to them a week earlier.
Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt as an adult with four counts of murder in the shootings Wednesday at the school, AP quoted Hosey.
Classes were cancelled Thursday at the Georgia high school, though some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with heads bowed.
The nine people — eight students and one teacher — who were taken to the hospital after the shooting were all expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.
Authorities have not offered any motive or explained how the suspect obtained the gun and got it into the school of roughly 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of metro Atlanta’s ever-expanding sprawl.
‘We’ve gotta stop it’
The Democratic Party’s presidential contender, US Vice President Kamala Harris, referred to the Georgia killing as a “senseless tragedy.”
“We’ve gotta stop it. We have to end this epidemic of gun violence,” she said at a campaign event.
US President Joe Biden was briefed on the shooting, according to a statement from the White House, “and his administration will continue coordinating with federal, state, and local officials as we receive more information.”
“Jill and I are mourning the deaths of those whose lives were cut short due to more senseless gun violence and thinking of all of the survivors whose lives are forever changed,” Biden said in a statement.
In addition, he urged Republicans to work together with Democrats to enact “common-sense gun safety legislation.”
Former American President and the Republican presidential contender, Donald Trump, described it as a “tragic” incident. He said, “These cherished children were taken from us far too soon by a sick and deranged monster.”
With inputs from agencies
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