Prosecutors Lay Out Case Against Father of Teen Charged in Georgia Shooting

Opening arguments began on Monday in the trial against Colin Gray, who prosecutors say is criminally culpable after his son killed four people at his high school.

On Sept. 4, 2024, Apalachee High School went into a lockdown and reports and rumors about a deadly mass shooting spread quickly through Winder, Ga. Many parents scrambled for information, terrified their children had been hurt, or worse.

But as prosecutors recounted on Monday, Colin Gray, whose son was a ninth grader, had a different fear.

He texted his daughter asking if she had heard anything from Colt, his 14-year-old son. She had not, but she wrote back, “I think we’re thinking the same thing.” Mr. Gray hurried home, looking for the AR-15-style rifle that he had given his son for Christmas and let him keep in his room. It was gone.

When police officers arrived, before they could even explain why they were there, Mr. Gray told them, “I knew it.”

Two students and two teachers had been killed, and the authorities said that Colt Gray was the perpetrator. On Monday, his father was on trial in a Georgia courtroom as prosecutors began making the case that he shouldered significant blame for the violence.

Mr. Gray faces charges including second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children. Colt Gray, now 16, is awaiting trial on 55 charges, including counts of murder and aggravated assault.

In the search for accountability as one American community after another has been plunged into the grief caused by a mass shooting, an increasingly common legal tactic has been to focus on parents, using criminal charges and civil litigation to hold them responsible when their child is believed to have carried out an attack.

Mr. Gray’s case has emerged as a high-profile test of that approach. But in opening arguments on Monday, Brad Smith, the lead prosecutor, said that the charges against him were not about a broader societal debate over the role of parents.

“This case is about this defendant and his actions,” he said.

And, he argued, it was perhaps just as much about Mr. Gray’s inaction. He had not taken the gun away from his son, despite his increasingly erratic and violent behavior. He also had not gotten his son psychological help, even as he and others around him recognized a pressing need for it.

Prosecutors described the path leading up to the shooting as being littered with warning signs.

Mr. Gray’s lawyers contended on Monday that it was unfair to expect him to know what his son was planning, and that the warnings appeared so clearly only after the fact.

“The law doesn’t allow for hindsight to substitute for evidence,” said Brian Hobbs, one of his lawyers, adding that the court was “not here to provide a scapegoat — it’s here to provide justice.”

Still, there was no doubt about the nearly constant turbulence throughout Colt Gray’s childhood and his diminishing ability to cope with it.

His family bounced from house to house, county to county. With each move, Colt changed schools. By seventh grade, he had been enrolled in seven schools in a period of just four years.

During that time, his mother, Marcee Gray, had repeated encounters with law enforcement officers, and she had been ordered to stay away from drugs and alcohol. Eventually, his parents split. She kept the younger two children, and Mr. Gray took custody of Colt Gray, his eldest son. Later, after Ms. Gray failed a drug test, Mr. Gray took sole custody of all three children.

In 2023, Colt Gray appeared on the radar of law enforcement after the F.B.I. received anonymous tips warning that a Discord user had threatened in a chat group to “shoot up a middle school,” according to investigators’ reports.

Investigators traced the posts back to an email address belonging to Colt Gray, then 13. The sheriff’s office in Jackson County, Ga., where he and his father lived at the time, dispatched deputies to their home, and he denied posting the threat.

Mr. Gray told investigators that he kept hunting rifles in the house, but that his son’s access was not “unfettered.” He said that he would be “mad as hell” if his son had made the online threat, and that if it were true, “then all the guns will go away,” according to a transcript of the conversation.

The deputies could not ultimately determine whether Colt Gray had made the threat.

For the 2023-24 school year, he was never enrolled in school. He missed the eighth grade entirely.

His mother moved back in, and his behavior worsened, prosecutors said. He punched a hole in a door. He had panic attacks. “Colt begins to spiral out of control,” Mr. Smith said. His parents started giving him his mother’s Zoloft, an antidepressant, hoping it would help. They began searching for more treatment options, including hospitalization, but did not follow through.

In one episode, he shoved his mother to the ground. She left, moving back to her parents’ house. At another point, he asked his grandmother if she would still love him if he did something terrible. The question scared her. She tried to have him admitted for inpatient care, but she was told a parent had to bring him.

Throughout all the turmoil, prosecutors said, he was still allowed to keep the rifle in his room.

For the 2024-25 school year, he enrolled at Apalachee, a campus with about 1,900 students in Winder, an Atlanta exurb. Once classes began, he missed the first two weeks. The shooting took place a few weeks into the school year; it was only the fifth day he had attended school.

During first period, in his computer science class, he had his backpack with the rifle next to him, hiding the part poking out by wrapping it with a poster board, prosecutors said. He asked the teacher if the school had done active shooter drills, and she said there had been one the previous week. The question struck her as odd. She emailed a counselor and a vice principal.

In second period, Colt Gray asked to go to the counselor’s office, but instead went to the bathroom and locked himself in a stall, prosecutors said. He stayed there for 26 minutes.

Around the same time, his mother called the school. Her son had sent text messages that alarmed her. She and the counselor had a call that lasted eight and a half minutes. She did not mention until the end of the conversation that he had access to guns.

A vice principal and school resource officers went to his second period class to retrieve him. They confused him with another student with a nearly identical name. They found that boy and search his backpack; they realized they had the wrong student.

Prosecutors said that Colt Gray emerged from the bathroom, armed.

He approached his classroom; the door was locked. A classmate went to open it and saw the rifle through a window, prosecutors said. The teacher pressed a button attached to her lanyard, prompting a lockdown and summoning a swarm of law enforcement officers to the campus.

In the hallway and in another classroom, whose door had been left open, he fired indiscriminately, prosecutors said. In addition to the four people killed, nine others were wounded.

Colt Gray was confronted by officers and surrendered.

Investigators found a notebook that he had left in class that day. He had sketched out the layout of classrooms and hallways, investigators said, and had written down estimates of how many people he believed he could kill or wound. On his bedroom wall, he had what prosecutors described as a “shrine” dedicated to the gunman who killed 17 people in a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla.

A day after the shooting, the father was also arrested and charged.

On Monday, Mr. Hobbs, his lawyer, challenged the prosecution’s description of Mr. Gray as willfully ignorant of his son’s problems. He kept close watch over him, Mr. Hobbs said. He agonized over how to help him and how to connect with him, but he was ultimately out of his depth.

His lawyer acknowledged the difficulty for the jury in looking beyond the harrowing details of the attack. After all, that is why the jury was drawn from another county. The judge had doubts that a jury from Barrow County, which includes Winder, could be impartial.

“We’re not going to dispute the horror of what happened,” Mr. Hobbs told the jury. “That’s not proof he was negligent. That’s not proof he knew what was in Colt’s heart.”

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