The 14-year-old accused of killing two students and two teachers in a shooting attack at his high school made his first appearance at a courthouse in northern Georgia on Friday. About half an hour later, his father appeared in the same courtroom.
The teenager, Colt Gray, faces four charges of felony murder. The father, Colin Cray, 54, is accused of allowing his son, a high school freshman, access to the military-style rifle used in the mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., on Wednesday morning.
The teenager’s hearing in the Winder courtroom lasted less than 10 minutes. He appeared alongside a public defender, Zane Harmon, who told the judge that there was no request for bond.
The blond-haired suspect, whose face was not visible to cameras because he is a minor, briefly answered procedural questions from Judge Currie M. Mingledorff II before he was escorted out of the courtroom. He wore a green T-shirt with khaki pants and boots.
About half an hour later, the judge brought the teen back into the courtroom to tell him that because he is a minor, he would not face the death penalty. The maximum sentence for the crimes he is accused of would be life in prison, either with or without parole.
Family members of those killed in the shooting lined the first row of the courtroom and spilled into the second. They sat quietly, facing the judge. Some wiped their eyes.
The students who died were Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, officials said. The educators who died, both math teachers, were Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie.
On Thursday, Colin Gray, the father, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder and other crimes in connection with the shooting. Officials say that a “complex investigation” is ongoing, and that they may file additional charges.
Questions have swirled about what motivated the suspect to open fire at the school where he was a new student, just over a month into the school year. The shooter used a black AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle, according to arrest warrants. The four killings happened within minutes.
At the sound of gunshots, the school went into lockdown. The locked classroom doors, as well as a newly installed alarm system, may have helped to prevent further bloodshed, officials said.
Some students said that they had huddled quietly in their classrooms for more than an hour, and many had left their phones behind when they eventually evacuated to the school’s football field, making it hard for them to connect with anxious family members. Traffic snarled around the school as parents scrambled to find their children.
Law enforcement officials said that the suspect surrendered to school resource officers and was taken into custody The police have found evidence that he was interested in mass shootings, particularly the 2018 massacre at a high school in Parkland, Fla., according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation.
Relatives suggested that he had a troubled home life. Charlie Polhamus, the teenager’s maternal grandfather, said he believed his grandson was responsible for what happened but also cast some of the blame on the tumult in the teenager’s life with his father, who had split from Mr. Polhamus’s daughter.
“My grandson did what he did because of the environment that he lived in,” Mr. Polhamus said.
In May of last year, F.B.I. officials were alerted to some disturbing messages on Discord, a social media platform: Someone in a chat group had threatened to possibly “shoot up a middle school.”
A report from the Jackson County sheriff’s office, obtained by The New York Times, said that an email associated with the Discord user who had made the threat belonged to the suspect. The report detailed how investigators looked into it but were unable to definitively link the threats to the boy, then 13, who denied that he had been the author.
At the time, Colin Gray told an investigator that he and his wife were no longer together and that they had been evicted from their home. The father also told investigators that he had hunting rifles in the house, but that his son did not have “unfettered” access to them, according to a transcript of the May 2023 interview obtained by The Times.
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