Teen and father charged in Georgia school shooting appear in court for the first time

The 14-year-old suspect in a shooting at a Georgia high school that killed four people appeared in court for the first time Friday, then his father was brought into the same courtroom for back-to-back hearings in which their lawyers declined to seek bail.

Colt Gray was charged as an adult with four counts of murder in the deaths of Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. The attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, outside Atlanta, also sent another nine people to hospitals.

After the hearing, the suspect was escorted out in shackles at the wrists and ankles in khaki pants and a green shirt. The judge then called him back to the courtroom to correct an earlier misstatement that his crimes could be punishable by death. Because he’s a juvenile, the maximum penalty he would face is life without parole. The judge set another hearing for Dec. 4.

Shortly after the teen’s hearing, his father, Colin Gray, was brought into court. The 54-year-old has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said.

Colin Gray, dressed in a gray-striped jail uniform, answered questions in a barely audible croak, giving his age as 54 and saying he finished 11th grade, earning a high school equivalency diploma.

About 50 onlookers were in the courtroom for the hearings, in addition to news media and sheriff’s deputies. Some family members of victims in the front row hugged one another and one woman clutched a stuffed animal.

Before the hearings at the Barrow County courthouse, court workers set out boxes of tissue along courtroom benches, and relatives and community members began to trickle into the courtroom Friday morning in advance of the hearings for the son and father.

According to arrest warrants obtained by the Associated Press, Colt Gray is accused of using a “black semi-automatic AR-15 style rifle” to kill two students and two teachers at the school. Authorities have not offered any motive or explained how he obtained the gun or got it into the school. The mass shooting has renewed debate about safe storage laws for guns.

The father’s “charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Hosey said.

It’s the latest example of prosecutors holding parents responsible for their children’s actions in school shootings.

In April in Michigan, Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first parents in the U.S. to be held responsible for a child carrying out a mass school attack. They were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for not securing a firearm at home and acting indifferently to signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health before he killed four students in 2021.

Authorities in Georgia interviewed the suspect in the Winder attack last year about a menacing post on social media, according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday. Colt Gray at the time denied threatening to carry out a school shooting. Conflicting evidence on the post’s origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the report from May 2023 and found nothing that would have justified bringing charges at the time.

The Friday morning court hearings for the father and son came as police in the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody said schools there have received threats of violence since the Georgia shooting. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation also noted that numerous threats have been made to schools across the state this week.

The attack was the latest among dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Conn.; Parkland, Fla.; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have set off fervent debates about gun control, but there has been little change to national gun laws.

It was the 30th mass killing in the U.S. so far this year, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 people have died in those killings, which are defined as events in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.

Associated Press writer Amy reported from Winder, Martin from Atlanta. AP journalists Charlotte Kramon, Sharon Johnson, Mike Stewart and Erik Verduzco in Winder; Trenton Daniel and Beatrice Dupuy in New York; Eric Tucker in Washington; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Ga.; Kate Brumback in Atlanta; and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.