The 14-year-old arrested after a mass shooting at Georgia’s Apalachee High School had been “begging for months” for mental health help before he allegedly carried out a deadly attack Wednesday, according to an aunt of the suspect.
He “was begging for help from everybody around him,” the aunt, Annie Brown, told The Washington Post. “The adults around him failed him.”
Brown, who lives in Central Florida, declined to elaborate on the teen’s mental health challenges but said she tried from afar to get him help. She said his struggles were exacerbated by a difficult home life. He and his family had “previous contacts” with the local child services department, Chris Hosey, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at a news conference Wednesday night.
Brown said that in January, she helped her nephew enroll at Haymon-Morris Middle School in Barrow County so he could finish eighth grade following a period of absenteeism. He had just started ninth grade at Apalachee High this school year, she said.
Law enforcement authorities have confirmed that he was a student at Apalachee. A spokesperson for the school district did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his prior enrollment history.
The shooting at Apalachee on Wednesday morning left four people dead: two staff members and two students. Authorities have identified the suspect as Colt Gray. Gray’s parents have not commented publicly. The Post’s efforts to reach them for comment were unsuccessful.
Authorities have also said he was interviewed in May 2023 by law enforcement officers in neighboring Jackson County who were investigating online threats to carry out a school shooting.
At the time, 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,” according to records of the investigation by the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, which had received a tip from the FBI about a threat to open fire in a local middle school.
The threatening comments were made on the social media platform Discord from an account associated with an email address that the FBI believed was owned by the teen, the records say. The teen told officers he had previously used Discord but got rid of his account months earlier “because too many people kept hacking his account and he was afraid someone would use his information for nefarious purposes,” the records show.
The account flagged by the FBI featured a profile name written in Russian that, when translated, spelled out “Lanza,” referring to Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooter, according to the records.
The suspect’s father, Colin Gray, told investigators at the time that he was unfamiliar with Discord and said he had no knowledge of the email address associated with the Discord account that made threats. He also said that his son “does not know or speak Russian,” according to the records.
He told officers that he allowed his son to use his hunting rifles when supervised but that the child, who was 13 at the time, did not have “unfettered access to them.” The weapons were kept in the house, according to the report.
The records show that one officer said he urged the man to keep the firearms locked away and advised him on May 21 to “keep the teen out of school until the matter could be resolved.”
On May 23, the investigator noted that the case would be “exceptionally cleared” because the tip alleging Colt’s role in the threat could not be substantiated. Officers were unable to confirm that the Discord account was linked to Colt Gray, and information included in the FBI tip was “unreliable,” the records say. The officers noted in the report that the FBI tip included a brief physical description of the suspect that did not match the teen’s appearance. The source of the physical description was unclear in the records.
At the time of Jackson County’s investigation, the teen’s father told officers that he and his wife had split up after their family was evicted from their home a few months earlier. The father said he and his son had moved and that, while his son had experienced “some problems” at the middle school he previously attended, things had “gotten a lot better” now that he was attending a new school.
It is unclear when the teenager stopped attending that school, Jefferson Middle School in Jefferson, Georgia.
Charles Polhamus, the suspect’s grandfather, told The Post he would have never thought his grandson capable of violence. Although the two had not spoken in more than a year, Polhamus, who was once his grandson’s baseball coach, remembered the teen as an overall “good kid.” Polhamus said he felt terrible for the victims.
Brown said that since the shooting, she has been praying for “the families who have been affected because of my nephew’s actions.”
She said she would also continue to support her nephew. Without excusing his actions, Brown said he was still “just a baby” who was never given the mental health support he needed and repeatedly requested.
Alice Crites and Chris Dehghanpoor contributed to this report.
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