BARROW COUNTY, Ga. — The father of the student deputies say shot and killed four people inside Apalachee High School cried in court Tuesday morning.
Colin Gray is on trial, accused of giving his son, Colt, the gun used in the shooting. Prosecutors have charged the dad with 29 crimes linked to the mass shooting, arguing the father knew his son could cause harm, yet he never locked up the guns in the home.
Tuesday, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent who interviewed the dad hours after the shooting testified.
Her name is Kelsey Ward.
“We wanted to gather information about the family dynamics, about Colt himself and his background, where he had obtained the firearm that he had used during the shooting and any info we could obtain about his mental health,” Ward testified.
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Prosecutors played jurors a voice recording Ward took when interviewing the father that day.
Colin is heard telling Ward, “I never could have even imagined this happening.”
The father cried in the courtroom as this portion of the interview played.
“I want to apologize to somebody, and I don’t know who,” he’s heard saying in the recording.
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His son, Colt, had just taken an AR-15 style weapon the dad bought him for Christmas and used it to shoot inside Apalachee High School.
Bullets and shrapnel hit three teachers and eight students. Four of them died. They were math teachers Cristina Irimie and Ricky Aspinwall and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo.
In the recording, jurors can hear the father tell agents that his son’s anxiety escalated over the past five to seven months, his son won’t go to school, and his son started hitting him.
“Hell bull rush me, and I’ll kind of hold him in place,” said Colin Gray in the recording. “He hit me in the face.”
The father did not admit to agents that he was aware of his son’s interest in school shootings. He did acknowledge to agents that he knew his son had pictures of a convicted mass murderer on his wall. He told agents that he and Colt’s mother planned to get him into counseling.
The agent who interviewed the father, Ward, told jurors, “Just in the week prior to the incident occurring, he said he had been on the phone with counselors, and he felt Colt maybe needed to be checked into a place.”
The agent asked the father where his guns were stored. He said they were in Colt’s room and in his closet. He said they were not locked up.
The dad said in the recording, “This was not on my damn radar.”
He told agents that the last time he saw his son was before school that morning.
“I said, hey, make sure you please go to school today. It’s very important. I need to get these counselors involved. He said I’m going to go, don’t worry,” Colin said in the recording.
Colin read a text message to agents. He said his son sent it to him minutes before the mass shooting.
“Out of the blue, he said, I’m sorry. It’s not your fault,” Colin told investigators.
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