Three weeks before Georgia's Colt Gray became the youngest mass school shooter in a quarter century, his grandmother told him to hide in his bedroom and shut the door. He had called his grandmother because his mother was angry and “acting weird again.” His mom had struck him in the past, the grandmother told the Washington Post. This time, the 14-year-old decided to confront his mother when she stepped through the doorway. He reached for the AR-style rifle his dad had bought him for Christmas, using the gun to shove her out of the bedroom and into a wall in the hallway. By then, family members said, Colt was adrift in a childhood ravaged by violence and addiction and overlooked by a system that failed to pull him out of it. His grandmother, Debbie Polhamus, had for years prodded schools, counselors and caseworkers to help him. None of it had been enough.
On Sept. 4, authorities said,, the teen used his rifle to kill two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder. The next day, his father became the first parent of an alleged school shooter to be charged with murder. The path that led Colt to a jail cell offers what the Post calls "an extraordinary case study on the making of yet another young man accused of gunning down children in their schools — a story, like so many before it, of neglect, dysfunction and missed or ignored warnings. The newspaper provides an account of the circumstances that preceded last month’s bloodshed. Over three years, institutions charged with protecting children and the wider public encountered Colt in times of crisis but did not prevent the violence that would follow. Colt and his family interacted with child welfare workers, four school systems, three county sheriffs departments and two local police agencies. Though state caseworkers had long monitored his family, Colt did not attend any school during the academic year before the shooting. Colt’s parents, addicted to drugs and alcohol, were inattentive, often cruel and sometimes entirely absent. Last fall, Colt’s mother, high on methamphetamine, declared that she was going to kill him. The remark haunted the teen for months.
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