Colin Gray to take stand

The father of the suspected Apalachee High School shooter is scheduled to testify in his own defense Friday morning.

Colin Gray faces 29 charges in connection with this deadly crime.

The Barrow County Prosecutor’s Office accuses Gray of buying his son the gun used in the mass shooting.

During opening statements Monday, District Attorney Brad Smith told jurors that Gray gave his son, Colt, access to the gun even though he knew it could harm others.

Inside the home where Colt, the alleged shooter, lived with his father, jurors saw ammunition scattered throughout the house.

Jurors saw photos of evidence of an unlocked AR-style rifle and shotgun in the bedroom of the father, Colin Gray.

Crime scene investigators said no guns in the house were locked. No weapons or ammunition were locked in safes.

In the interrogation video, the father told Deputy Jason Smith that he sometimes allowed his son to keep the gun in his bedroom.

“Ultimately, he admitted that Colt was allowed to keep the gun in his bedroom,” Smith told the jury.

“Why didn’t you do this last week?” » Smith asked.

“It wasn’t on the radar,” Gray responded.

“You say it’s not on your radar, but something was on your radar,” the deputy responded.

On the son’s cell phone there were photos of the child posing with it, pointing it at the camera and putting it in his mouth.

In the interview room, the father admitted that his son’s anxiety was getting worse, that he was having violent outbursts, that deputies in another county had accused him of threatening to shoot up a school before and that the teen had cut himself.

The father said he could not yet afford a safe. However, he considered giving the weapons to someone else for storage.

“Do you think if you had gotten rid of those weapons we would be here right now?” » asked the deputy.

Colin Gray replied: “I don’t know. »

He said he bought his son the AR-15, 223 Sig Sauer for Christmas because he wanted to introduce him to hunting and target shooting to bond. That was seven months after the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office charged the son with threatening a school shooting online.

Before that, Ben Hill school counselors said Colt Gray used a school computer to search online for “how to kill your father.”

Last week, prosecutors presented photos of evidence showing the interior of a computer room used by Colt. On display on the wall were several photos of Nicholas Cruz, the man convicted of the fatal shooting inside Parkland High School in Florida. Various news articles related to the shooting were posted on the wall along with Cruz’s photos.

Smith questioned the son’s interest in the school shootings in the interrogation room.

He showed the wall photos to Colin Gray.

“Is it in his room?” said Colin Gray.

“Yes, sir,” Smith said.

The father replied: “I’ll tell you right now, I’ve never seen anything like it. »

Photos on Colt Gray’s cell phone show he placed it there in April 2024.

The same month, texts show that the father discusses the behavior of his son who had become violent. The child cut himself, hit his parents, damaged furniture and walls.

The father continued to buy his son bullets and shooting accessories, although his son repeatedly sought help due to feelings of mania, anxiety, and depression.

May 2024 marks the first time cell phone records suggest the father was looking for a gun safe to purchase for the home.

He never bought it.

In August, Colt started school, but prosecutors said he didn’t want to go.

“I’m holding back on what I want to do,” Colt Gray wrote his father in a text message. “I have no control over what these things say and tell me to do.”

Eight days before the shooting, the father’s phone showed another online search for gun safes. There were no purchases.

“Whenever something happens, know that blood is on your hands,” Colt Gray wrote to his father.

The week before the shooting, the father used his cell phone to search for mental health treatment centers for adolescents. Prosecutors said he was supposed to drop his son off at a facility in Athens the Saturday before the shooting. Instead, he took him to a guitar store where he bought the kid a beanie.

The child used the hat to cover the top of the rifle to sneak it into school a few days later. He wrapped the rifle with a Mother’s Day poster board drawing he made for his mother while she was in rehab last May.

Minutes before the shooting began, the son sent text messages to his father saying, “I’m sorry” and “It’s not your fault.”

The father cried in court as he watched surveillance video showing his son firing a gun into the school. He first fired bullets into a classroom, hitting seven students; Christian Angulo died. The other six affected survived.

The video shows Colt continuing down a hallway, shooting three teachers: David Phenix, Cristina Irimie and Ricky Aspinwall. Irimie and Aspinwall did not survive.

The teenager then sees another student in the hallway. It was Mason Schermerhorn. He tries to run, but Colt shoots and kills him.

“He tried to raise the gun to aim at another student,” Officer Lucas Beyer said. “At that point, school resource officers came down the hallway and tried to get Colt to stop shooting.”

Beyer told jurors the rampage lasted 41 seconds.

“He got on his stomach, stretched his arms out like an airplane, turned his head away from us and didn’t look,” Deputy Brandon King said. “It was like he knew what to do.”

Forty-two minutes before the shooting began, a teacher told then-assistant principal Deigh Martin that she thought a child had a gun in his backpack.

“She said it was awkward and heavy and there was a billboard with a hat on it,” Martin said.

In an effort to point out possible missteps before the shooting that did not involve the father, defense attorney Jim Berry pointed out that Martin never asked the teacher for a description of the suspect, ended up removing the bad student from class and spent time searching rooms and surveillance videos without success.

A school counselor, Lisa Butler, told jurors that the student’s mother, Marcee, called her 21 minutes before the shooting. She warned that her son had access to guns and was sending strange text messages to his family.

“She was worried about him because he had access to several guns through his father and had become obsessed with school shootings,” Butler said.

Butler said she hung up, called the chief counselor, but no one answered the phone. She said she called the assistant principal, Deigh Martin, but no one answered that line either.

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