Authorities identified a 14-year-old student as the suspect in a Wednesday morning shooting that killed four people at Apalachee High School and hospitalized nine others.
The student, Colt Gray, gave himself up soon after school resource officers encountered him at the school, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.
Gray is accused of using an AR-platform-style weapon Wednesday, but no details were available about how or why the teenager allegedly fired inside the school.
GBI director Chris Hosey said Gray would be charged with murder and tried as an adult. Two students and two teachers were killed, Hosey said. The nine people injured were all struck by gunfire, the sheriff said.
In the hours after the shooting, Gray sat for an interview with investigators from the sheriff’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Smith said, and authorities also interviewed Gray’s family.
Scant detail is known about Gray and his motivation to allegedly open fire at the school, near Winder, which sits about 23 miles west of Athens on the edge of the Atlanta metro area. At an afternoon news conference, authorities did not disclose what Gray and his family told police during their interviews.
Smith said investigators hadn’t yet determined if the victims were targeted and didn’t know how the shooter obtained a gun. Law enforcement wasn’t aware of any threats before the shooting, he said.
“I don’t know why it happened. I may not ever know. We may not ever know,” the sheriff said. “But I ask that you and our community lift up our schools, lift up our public safety, and that again, we do not let this hateful event prevail.”
The FBI said Wednesday evening that it had previously investigated Gray for threats about a school shooting.
In May 2023, the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center received several anonymous tips about threats to commit a school shooting made on an online gaming site, the FBI and Jackson County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. The threats didn’t identify a school or when it would happen, but they contained pictures of guns.
Investigators tracked the post to Georgia and to Jackson County, where sheriff’s deputies continued the investigation. A 13-year-old, Colt Gray, was interviewed along with his father, an FBI spokesman said.
“The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them,” the FBI said. “The subject denied making the threats online.”
The Jackson sheriff’s office alerted local schools at the time, and Gray was monitored, the FBI said.
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