Mother Of GA School Shooter Warned Of 'Extreme Emergency'

The mother of Georgia's Apalachee High School gunman, Colt Gray, told family members that she called the school on the morning of the shooting and warned a counselor about an “extreme emergency” involving her 14-year-old son, the Washington Post reports. A call log from the family’s shared phone plan shows a 10-minute call from the mother’s phone to the school starting at 9:50 a.m. — about a half-hour before witnesses have said the gunman opened fire. “I was the one that notified the school counselor at the high school,” Marcee Gray texted her sister after the shooting. “I told them it was an extreme emergency and for them to go immediately and find [my son] to check on him.”

A counselor told Gray during the call that her son had been talking about a school shooting that morning, according to Gray’s sister, Annie Brown. Around the same time, a school administrator went to the son’s math classroom, according to Lyela Sayarath, a student in the class. Sayarath said there seemed to be confusion involving another student in the class with a name similar to that of Gray’s son. Neither student was in the room, and the official left with a backpack belonging to the similarly named student. The shooting began minutes later. The evidence shows that officials at Apalachee High were alerted to concerns about Colt Gray on the morning of the shooting and may have been looking for him in the minutes before he killed four people and injured nine with an AR-15-style rifle. Texts show that the school and family were in contact about his mental health a week before the shooting, and that Brown told a relative the teen was having “homicidal and suicidal thoughts.”