Mother testifies she urged Colin Gray to lock up guns before Apalachee High shooting in Georgia

ATLANTA (AP) — Accused school shooter Colt Gray and his family lived a chaotic life, fighting, arguing and moving frequently due to financial issues, his mother testified in the trial of Colt’s father, Colin Gray.

Marcee Gray said she urged the boy’s father to take the guns in the home northeast of Atlanta and lock them inside his truck so they were not accessible to Colt.

“They need to be locked somewhere,” she told a jury in Winder, Georgia. “Initially he said he would.”

Marcee Gray’s testimony on Monday opened the second week in the trial of Colin Gray, who faces 29 counts, including two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors say the father should be accountable for giving his son the weapon used in the shooting as a Christmas gift despite alleged threats and warning signs that the boy was mentally unstable.

Colt, who was 14 years old at the time of the shooting, faces 55 counts, including murder in the deaths of four people and 25 counts of aggravated assault. He’s accused of carefully planning the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder that left two teachers and two students dead and several others wounded.

In dramatic testimony last week, several Georgia high school students last week testified in court about the horrors of being shot during their algebra class. They recounted through tears seeing a classmate in a pool of blood, then seeing blood on their own bodies and fearing they might die. There has also been testimony about what prosecutors describe as a “shrine” to a Florida school shooter that Colt kept on a wall next to his computer at home.

This is one of several cases around the nation where prosecutors are trying to hold parents responsible after their children are accused in fatal shootings.

Colt’s parents were separated in the months leading up to the shooting, and Colt lived mostly with his father during that time. Marcee Gray is not charged in connection to the school shooting.

She said Colt had an interest in Nikolas Cruz, convicted of the 2018 shooting that left 14 students and three staff members dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. But Marcee Gray said she thought Colt’s interest in Cruz was similar to her own interest in true crime documentaries, she said.

When he made a comment about using a tactical vest his dad had brought him to complete his own “school shooter outfit,” he claimed he was joking when he told her that.

“He was talking about a vest, his dad buying him a vest, and he said it in what I thought was a joking manner because he was laughing,” she testified. “He was talking about getting the vest and he said ‘yeah, I’ve got to finish my school shooter outfit,’ or something like that or ‘dad’s going to finish my finish my school shooter outfit.’”

Brian Hobbs, an attorney for Colin Gray, has said the shooting’s planning and timing “were hidden by Colt Gray from his father.”

“That’s the difference between tragedy and criminal liability,” he said previously. “You cannot hold someone criminally responsible for failing to predict what was intentionally hidden from them.”

With a semiautomatic rifle in his book bag, the barrel sticking out and wrapped in poster board, Colt Gray boarded the school bus, investigators said. He left his second-period class and emerged from a bathroom with the gun and then shot people in a classroom and hallways, they said.

Colin Gray had given his son the gun as a Christmas gift and continued to buy accessories after that, including “a lot of ammunition,” Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith said in his opening statement.

Colin Gray was also aware his son’s mental health had deteriorated and had sought help from a counseling service weeks before the shooting, an investigator testified.

“We have had a very difficult past couple of years and he needs help. Anger, anxiety, quick to be volatile. I don’t know what to do,” Colin Gray wrote about his son.

But Smith said Colin Gray never followed through on concerns about getting his son admitted to an inpatient facility.