The father of suspected Georgia school shooter Colt Gray took the stand in his own defense Friday in a trial where he is accused of providing his teenage son with access to a gun before the 2024 massacre.
Colin Gray, 55, pleaded not guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of involuntary manslaughter, 20 counts of cruelty to children and five counts of reckless conduct. His then 14-year-old son, Colt Gray, is accused of going on a shooting spree at Apalachee High School on September 4, 2024, killing two students, two teachers and injuring nine others.
The tenth day of the trial opened with testimony from the 55-year-old, who described his volatile relationship with Colt and his attempts to bond with his teenage son through hunting. He testified about being visited by law enforcement before the shooting after receiving a tip from the FBI that his son was involved in online conversations about school shootings.
Gray told the court that when his son was in sixth grade, he got behind the school’s firewall to find ways to kill him. Gray said he was concerned and had a conversation with his son when he learned about it months later, warning him it was a very serious matter.
Gray said that when Colt was in seventh grade, several kids expressed that he was being bullied and that he was eating lunch by himself.
“He was a real quiet kid. He was very shy, is the best way I can put it,” Gray said.
Around this time, Gray said he broke up with Colt’s mother, Marci Gray, who said he was using substances. Marcy Gray left her home with her two youngest children. Colt stayed with him, saying he went to Colt’s school to talk to a counselor and find a way to get him help and away from any bullying he was facing.
Gray said he thought of hunting as a way to help his son cope.
“My original thought was this would be a good way to get my son away from his mom and everybody, and use that time to make a kind of comfortable enough place where we could do what we loved to do when I was little, and he could talk to me freely and freely,” Gray said.
Gray testified that he took his son to practice shooting ranges and then deer hunting. He played golf with his son and bought him a guitar because he was always interested in music.
He recalled buying his son a rifle for Christmas, saying it would be his gun if he attended school and did well.
Gray recalled that before the shooting, authorities contacted him about his son.
She explained that Jackson County sheriffs came to her door to talk about a tip from the FBI that Colt had been involved in a discordant conversation related to a school shooting.
“I told him at one point in this conversation, if he thought it was related to Colt, in any way, shape or form,” he asked one of the representatives. “He asked me if I had guns in my house. I said, and he said he could take them. He could take those guns out of my house. I’d take them.”
Deputies left the home that day and needed to gather more information about the incident, Gray said. The next day, a deputy said there were several people in the Discord chat and they traced a suspicious IP address to California or Russia, Gray said.
“And at that point he said, ‘I don’t see a problem here,'” Gray said.
Gray said the deputy warned Colt not to let him have free access to the guns and asked how he was collecting them.
“I said, ‘They’re in my master building closet, where I’ve kept guns most of my life,'” Gray said. “When Colt was little, I said they were on the top shelf of my closet, you know, not lying around the house.”
The relationship between Gray and his son became increasingly strained when he began requesting “valuable items”.
“Sometimes, if he doesn’t get his way about whatever it is, you know, we might have words back and forth,” Gray told the court.
Bullying at school continued to become more difficult for Colt in seventh and eighth grades, Gray said, when kids would throw bottles of shampoo and milk at his son on the school bus. He started looking into online school options for his son and felt he had a chance with his sister’s help. It turns out Colt never enrolled in the online school, Gray said.
Gray said he would call his son while he was at work to make sure he was taking his classes.
“I remember him having a conversation with me about algebra class, and when I would come home from work, he would show me a page of what he was working on,” Gray said. “So, I never, you know, checked and that’s my bad. I, you know, I didn’t check what they were saying.”
Colt continued to fall behind in school, and Gray tried to persuade him to repeat the eighth grade, she said.
“Listen, could I have done better? Yes, I could have done better. I could have done more. I see it now,” Gray said. “But the overall goal here is to get him in a comfort zone spot.”
