The 14-year-old accused of killing four people at his Georgia high school this week had switched middle schools and drawn the attention of authorities who suspected he had posted school shooting threats online.
His mother had repeated encounters with law enforcement and had been ordered to stay away from drugs and alcohol. His family had been evicted from their home because of unpaid rent, and his parents had split.
Interviews with relatives and others who knew the teenager, and a review of court documents and law enforcement records, reflected a family in constant turmoil in the years before the shooting this week at Apalachee High School in Winder.
The suspect, Colt Gray, has been charged with four counts of murder for the Wednesday morning attack in which two students and two math teachers were killed and eight other students were injured. During his first court appearance on Friday, a judge informed him that he could face a maximum penalty of life in prison.
His father, Colin Gray, is facing second-degree murder and other charges, as officials argue that he shoulders considerable blame for giving his son the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle used in the attack. The weapon was a Christmas gift last year, according to three law enforcement officials. Mr. Gray, 54, faces a maximum sentence of 180 years in prison, if convicted.
During the brief hearing on Friday, relatives of the people who were killed sat directly behind the defendants, only a few feet away. The grief that the community in Winder is now wrestling with was palpable.
Within hours of the shooting on Wednesday, the F.B.I. disclosed the previous threats that the teenager might have made. The bureau said that he had been interviewed more than a year ago, after tipsters reported threats to “shoot up a middle school” that they had seen in an online chat group. The posts included photographs of guns, officials said.
The matter was referred to the sheriff’s office in Jackson County, Ga., near Winder, where the boy and his father lived at the time. The boy denied making the threats, which had been posted to Discord, a social media platform; he suggested that his account could have been hacked. The father told investigators that his son did not have “unfettered” access to guns in the home.
The father also told them he would be “mad as hell” if his son had made the online threat and “then all the guns will go away.”
The investigators ultimately determined that “the threat cannot be substantiated,” according to their reports.
But in interviews that they conducted with the father, transcripts of which were released this week, he described the troubles his son had in school. At one middle school in Jackson County, other students “just ridiculed him day after day after day,” the father said.
For eighth grade, the boy had moved to a new school where, his father said, the problems had been less severe.
But school was not the only source of the family’s problems.
The father described returning home one day in 2022 to see his possessions piled outside, an eviction underway.
“I’m like, what are they doing?” he recounted to an investigator. “Like, I don’t even know why y’all are here.”
They had been living in a 2,600-square-foot home in a development called Traditions, where rolling hills are dotted with elegant new houses, spacious yards and amenities that include a pool, tennis courts and a golf course.
But the family had fallen behind on rent, court documents showed, with their landlord starting eviction proceedings in February 2022, when they owed $3,634. Months later, the unpaid rent had increased to more than $11,000.
Among their possessions that were dragged into the yard during the eviction that August were a number of firearms, hunting bows and a lot of ammunition, records show.
When the parents separated around that time, the father apparently took informal custody of the son while two younger children went with the mother, Marcee Gray, the father told investigators.
The father and son moved into a modest house off a country road in neighboring Barrow County, where Colt Gray started at Apalachee High School early last month as a freshman.
Court records show that Ms. Gray has a criminal history over a number of years, including a guilty plea on charges of criminal damage to property and “criminal trespass/family violence.” She was also ordered by a court to pay back a car dealership after writing a bad check for $10,000 to buy a used Chevrolet Suburban, records showed.
According to arrest warrants, Ms. Gray was found in November with small amounts of methamphetamine, fentanyl and muscle relaxants. But court records indicate that she was not prosecuted for drug possession.
After the guilty plea in the criminal damage and trespass case, she received a five-year sentence in December that consisted of 46 days in jail and probation for the rest, according to court records. As part of the plea, she had to pay restitution to an Atlanta construction company and was ordered not to have direct contact with her estranged husband.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that in April, Ms. Gray was charged in Ben Hill County with the aggravated battery of a 73-year-old woman, along with counts of theft, false imprisonment and criminal trespass.
She has been living in Ben Hill County, several hours southeast of Atlanta and roughly 190 miles from Winder. She declined to talk when a reporter knocked on her door on Thursday; efforts to talk to the suspect’s father were also unsuccessful.
The shooting suspect’s father told investigators last year that he had introduced his son to guns and hunting as a way to bond with him and draw him out.
But Charlie Polhamus, the boy’s maternal grandfather, said the boy’s father had given him too much latitude with the weapons. Even before the charges against the father were announced on Thursday, he argued that the elder Mr. Gray shared responsibility for the attack.
“I understand my grandson did it — I understand that,” Mr. Polhamus, 81, said in a brief interview. “But he would not have if he did not have a father like he had. That’s as plain as I can put it.”
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