BARROW COUNTY, Ga. — The deputy who interrogated Colin Gray after the Apalachee High School shooting pressed him to explain why he never locked the guns in the house up so his son did not have access to them.
Gray is on trial, accused of giving his son, Colt Gray, the gun used in the shooting. The Barrow County District Attorney’s Office has charged the dad with 29 crimes linked to the mass murder.
Prosecutors argue the father knew his son could cause harm, yet he never locked up the guns in the home.
On Wednesday, the deputy who questioned the father after the shooting, Jason Smith, took the stand to testify.
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“Ultimately, he admitted Colt was allowed to keep the gun in his room,” Smith told the jury.
Prosecutors played jurors two and a half hours’ worth of interrogation room video. In it, Smith interviews the father after the shooting.
He asks the father why he never locked up the guns.
“Why didn’t you do that last week?” Smith asked.
“That was not on the radar,” Gray responded.
“You’re saying it’s not on your radar, but something was on your radar,” the deputy replied.
In the interrogation room, the dad admitted his son’s anxiety was getting worse; he was having violent outbursts. Deputies in another county had accused him of threatening to shoot up a school before, and the teen cut himself.
The dad said he could not afford a safe yet. However, he was considering giving the guns to someone else to store.
“Do you think if you had gotten rid of those guns, we’d be here right now?” asked the deputy.
The dad responded, “I don’t know.”
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He said he bought his son the AR-15 used in the crime for Christmas because he wanted to get him into hunting and target shooting to bond.
When the deputy informed the father how many people his child killed with that gun the dad said, “Why in the hell would he do this?”
In the video the dad told the deputy, “It comes across in this camera like I should have done more.”
The defense team had a chance to cross-examine the deputy on the witness stand Wednesday.
The defense attorneys chose to focus on the daughter’s interview after the shooting. She was in middle school at the time.
She told investigators her father was oblivious.
She told jurors on Tuesday that she lied at the time. She said looking back, she and her dad both knew this crime was possible.
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