Colt Gray, 14, shot up a school in Georgia, killing two students and two teachers. Platform users had flagged his profile a year earlier, after he was already talking about a plan to carry out a shooting.
Colt Gray, 14, opened fire last Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Winder, killing two comrades and two teachers. Nine other people were injured in the attack. However, it was revealed that this young American was already in the sights of the FBI. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office had also spoken to the teenager and his father in May 2023 about a shooting plot posted on a social network. The New York Times was able to consult the investigators’ report on this subject.
In May 2023, the FBI received several reports from users Discord, a platform of instant messaging. Internet users were alerting about messages from a user who threatened to shoot up a school. Authorities were able to quickly trace the Discord account to Colt Gray.
After identifying the boy, who was 13 at the time, investigators went to meet him on May 20 to question him. They first asked him about his username on the platform, which is written in Russian and translates to Lanza, the same surname of the author of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, where 20 students and six teachers were killed.
“Reserved behavior”
Colt and his father, Colin Gray, responded that they did not speak Russian and that the boy was not the one making the threats: “I would never write such a thing, even as a joke.”the boy promised. He confirmed that he had a Discord account but said he had deleted it because it had been hacked several times and they were worried that someone would use his information for malicious purposes. According to the NYTinvestigators wrote that the boy was “calm” and had a “reserved behavior”.
The father later told investigators that his son had experienced some problems at school, related to the “West Jackson College»but that since he was at Jefferson Middle School, everything had returned to normal. The father also confirmed that he had hunting rifles at home but that his son did not have access to them. The investigators left it at that. They did specify that they had notified Jefferson Middle School but that classes had already ended. Colt Gray was entering Apalachee High School in Winder, the middle school where the shooting occurred.
Sheriff Mangum confirmed that they investigated this matter as far as they could. “It’s not like we didn’t investigate.”she justified to the American press.
