Federal investigators said on Wednesday that the suspect in the shooting at a Georgia high school had been interviewed more than a year ago by local law enforcement officials in connection to threats made online of a school shooting.
The authorities were led to the suspect, Colt Gray, who was 13 at the time, after the F.B.I.’s National Threat Operations Center received several anonymous tips in May 2023 reporting threats that had been posted on an online gaming site warning of a school shooting at “an unidentified location and time,” according to statements from the F.B.I. field office in Atlanta and local law enforcement officials. The threats included photographs of guns.
Investigators from the sheriff’s office in Jackson County, Ga., interviewed the suspect and his father, the F.B.I. said. His father told investigators that he had hunting guns in the house, but said that his son did not have unsupervised access to the weapons. The suspect denied making the threats.
The F.B.I. said that the Jackson County authorities alerted local schools “for continued monitoring of the subject.” But it was unclear if officials at Apalachee High School, where the shooting took place and the suspect was a student this year, had been among those informed; the school is in Winder, Ga., in neighboring Barrow County.
The F.B.I., in its statement, said that investigators lacked probable cause to arrest the teenager or “take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels.”
In a separate statement, Janis G. Mangum, the sheriff in Jackson County, said that a “thorough investigation was conducted,” but that “the gaming site threats could not be substantiated.”
Ms. Mangum cautioned residents to be careful of posts containing misinformation circulating online. “My phone is blowing up with messages from people about social media postings about other possible incidents,” she said in a note on Facebook. “To my knowledge, there is not a list indicating any of this.”
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