ATLANTA (AP) — Accused school shooter Colt Gray and his family lived a tumultuous life, often fighting, bickering and moving because of financial problems, his mother testified at the trial of Colt’s father, Colin Gray.
Marcie Gray said she urged the boy’s father to bring the guns to his home in northeast Atlanta and lock them in his truck so Colt couldn’t get to them.
“They need to be locked up somewhere,” she told the jury in Winder, Georgia. “At first he said he would.”
Marcy Gray’s testimony Monday kicked off the second week of the trial of Colin Gray, who faces 29 counts, including two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors say the father is responsible for giving the weapon used in the shooting to his son as a Christmas gift despite alleged threats and warning signs that his son was mentally unstable.
Colt, who was 14 at the time of the shooting, faces 55 counts, including murder in the deaths of four people and 25 counts of aggravated assault. He is accused of orchestrating the September 4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, which killed two teachers and two students and injured many others.
In dramatic testimony last week, several Georgia high school students testified in court last week about the horror of being shot during an algebra class. They tearfully recounted seeing a classmate lying in a pool of blood, then seeing the blood on their own bodies and fearing they would die. There was also testimony that prosecutors placed a “shrine” to the Florida school shooter on the wall next to Colt’s home computer.
It’s one of several cases in which prosecutors across the country are trying to hold parents accountable after their children are accused of fatal shootings.
Colt’s parents separated in the months before the shooting, and Colt lived mostly with his father during that time. Marcy Gray has not been charged in connection with the school shooting.
She said Colt was interested in Nikolas Cruz, who was convicted of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that killed 14 students and three staff members. But Marci Gray said she sees Colt’s interest in Cruz as similar to her own interest in true-crime documentaries.
When he talked about using a tactical vest his father had brought him to complete his own “school shooting outfit,” he claimed he was joking when he told her.
“He was talking about a vest that his dad bought him and I thought he was joking because he was laughing,” she testified. “He was talking about getting a vest and he said ‘Yeah, I have to finish my school shooting outfit’, or something like that, or ‘Dad is going to finish my school shooting outfit.'”
Colin Gray’s attorney, Brian Hobbs, said the planning and timing of the shooting “were concealed by Colt Gray from his father.”
“That’s the difference between tragedy and criminal liability,” he previously said. “You can’t hold someone criminally responsible for failing to predict something that was intentionally withheld from them.”
Investigators say Colt Gray boarded the school bus with a semi-automatic rifle in his bag with the barrel extended and wrapped in poster board. They said he left the second period, came out of the bathroom with a gun and started shooting at people in the classroom and hallway.
Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith said in opening statements that Colin Gray gave the gun to his son as a Christmas gift and continued to purchase accessories, including “a large amount of ammunition.”
An investigator testified that Colin Gray was also aware of his son’s deteriorating mental health and sought help from counseling services weeks before the shooting.
“We’ve been through a very difficult time over the last few years and he needs help. Angry, anxious, emotionally unstable. I don’t know what to do,” Colin Gray said of his son.
But Smith said Colin Gray had been worried about putting his son in an inpatient facility and never took action.
