Following a frantic phone call from the mother of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old charged with killing four at Apalachee High School, officials initially sought out the wrong student amid their desperate efforts to prevent the bloodshed that was about to occur.
The warning from Marcee Gray, who phoned a school counselor after receiving troubling texts from Colt, came in around 9:50 a.m. on September 4, the morning of the shooting, according to phone logs obtained by the Washington Post. She told them there was an “extreme emergency” involving her son, sending school staff on the hunt for the teen who would eventually unleash carnage inside the building in Winder, Georgia.
But they were searching for the wrong person — an unrelated student named Colton Gray.
“They were in the same classroom, and they sat beside each other,” Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith told WSB-TV on Wednesday.
Another student in their math class, Lyela Sayarath, recalled some confusion in those moments. She said that while neither teen was present at the time, a school official eventually left the classroom with Colton Gray’s backpack.
The gunman, meanwhile, had asked to be excused so he could visit the front office, “which was not uncommon,” Smith said.
“He asked to go up front and speak to someone at the front, and when you do that you take your belongings with you,” he added.
So Colt left the classroom with his backpack in tow. Inside was an AR-style rifle, allegedly given to him by his father, Colin Gray.
“He brought it on his own,” Smith said when asked how the firearm got into the school building. “It wasn’t hidden in the school, it wasn’t given to him by someone else.”
Around 10:20 a.m, Colt pulled out his gun and opened fire inside Apalachee High School, fatally striking four people before he was approached by a school resource officer already on the scene. Authorities said he immediately surrendered and was charged with four counts of felony murder.
If convicted, Colt, who is being tried as an adult, faces the maximum sentence of life behind bars without the possibility of parole.
The teen’s father, accused of enabling his son to carry out the attack, was also arrested on more than a dozen charges stemming from the school shooting, including four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children. He faces up to 180 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
Those killed in the shooting include math teachers Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie, as well as two students, Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, both 14.
