Georgia school-shooting suspect struggled with mental health, aunt says

The 14-year-old arrested after a mass killing at Georgia’s Apalachee High School had been “begging for months” for mental health help before he allegedly carried out a deadly attack Wednesday, according to an aunt of the shooting suspect.

He “was begging for help from everybody around him,” Annie Brown, the aunt, told The Washington Post. “The adults around him failed him.”

Brown, who lives in Central Florida, declined to elaborate on the teen’s mental health challenges but said she tried from afar to get him help. She said his struggles were exacerbated by a difficult home life. He and his family had “previous contacts” with the local child services department, Chris Hosey, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at a news conference Wednesday night.

Brown said that in January she helped her nephew enroll at Haymon-Morris Middle School in Barrow County so he could finish eighth grade following a period of absenteeism. He had just started ninth grade at Apalachee High this school year, she said.

Authorities have also said he was interviewed in May 2023 by law enforcement officers in neighboring Jackson County who were investigating online threats to carry out a school shooting.

At the time, Gray “expressed concern that someone is accusing him of threatening to shoot up a school, stating that he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” according to records of the investigation by the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, which had received a tip from the FBI about a threat to open fire in a local middle school.

The threatening comments were made on the social media platform Discord from an account associated with an email address that the FBI believed was owned by the teen, the records say. The teen told officers he had previously used Discord but got rid of his account months earlier “because too many people kept hacking his account and he was afraid someone would use his information for nefarious purposes,” the records show.

The account flagged by the FBI featured a profile name written in Russian that, when translated, spelled out “Lanza,” referring to Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooter, according to the records.

The suspect’s father, Colin Gray, told investigators at the time that he was unfamiliar with Discord and said he had no knowledge of the email address associated with the Discord account that made threats. He also said that his son “does not know or speak Russian,” according to the records.

He told officers that he allowed his son to use his hunting rifles when supervised but that the child, who was 13 at the time, did not have “unfettered access to them.” The weapons were kept in the house, according to the report.

At the time of Jackson County’s investigation, the teen’s father told officers that he and his wife had split up after their family was evicted from their home a few months earlier. The father said he and his son had moved and that, while his son had experienced “some problems” at the middle school he previously attended, things had “gotten a lot better” now that he was attending a new school.

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