Source: Jessica McGowan / Getty
Investigators at the Georgia high school where a shooting occurred confirmed that the suspect had been interviewed about past threats.
On Wednesday night (September 4), authorities at a press conference held after a deadly shooting at a Georgia high school confirmed that the suspect had been interviewed about past threats by local law enforcement. The Federal Bureau of Investigation stated that their National Threat Operations Center had received several anonymous tips in 2023 about Colt Gray, the suspect in the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia which claimed the lives of four victims.
Gray, who was 13 at the time of the reports, had been interviewed by investigators from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office along with his father concerning those tips which spoke of the threats of a shooting at “an unidentified location and time,” with those threats containing photographs of guns. The suspect denied making those threats, which were found posted on an online gaming site. His father told the officers that he did have a collection of hunting guns at the home, but his son did not have unsupervised access to those weapons. The sheriff’s office then alerted the local schools “for continued monitoring of the subject.” It wasn’t clear if Apalachee High School received those alerts – the school is in the neighboring Barrow County. The F.B.I. issued a statement saying that local authorities didn’t have probable cause to “take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels.” The state Division of Child and Family Services was also contacted, according to an AP News report.
Gray was reportedly apprehended by school resource officials after immediately surrendering after the shooting, which claimed the lives of two students and two instructors at Apalachee. An assault-style rifle was used in the shooting, authorities confirmed. Jackson County Sheriff Janis C. Magnum cautioned against the spreading of misinformation in a statement on Facebook. “My phone is blowing up with messages from people about social media postings about other possible incidents,” she wrote. “To my knowledge, there is not a list indicating any of this.”