Georgia school shooting: Suspect claimed online threats had come from hacked account

The

father

of the

teenager

accused of Georgia's deadliest

school shooting

told investigators looking into an online threat last year that he had been teaching his son about guns and hunting and that the boy claimed that his account had been hacked.
"I'm going to be mad as hell if he did" make threats about a school shooting, said the father, Colin Gray, according to a transcript of the May 2023 interview obtained by The New York Times.

"Then all the guns will go away," he added.
Records from an eviction the previous year show that Gray owned several weapons, including an AR-15, the type of firearm that officials say was used in the shooting Wednesday morning at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
Gray said he wanted to get his son, Colt, now 14, interested in the outdoors and away from video games, according to the interview transcript. Colt, then 13, had recently shot his first deer, and his father kept a photo on his phone of the animal's blood smeared on the boy's cheeks -- a common tradition among hunters.

Gray said that he and his son had often discussed "all the school shootings, things that happen." He told the investigator with the Jackson County sheriff's office: "He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them."
Gray said his son had been picked on during the last three months of the school year, which had just ended at the time of the interview. The problems had escalated to the point at which Colt had trouble concentrating on his final exams, his father said.

Gray said he had been to his son's middle school frequently, talking to the principal and asking for support. "He gets flustered and under pressure," he said of Colt. "He doesn't really think straight."
The investigator was looking into tips about a post made in a chat group on Discord, a social media site, about a potential school shooting. The post, which had been reported to the FBI, was linked by investigators to the account associated with Gray's son.
Gray said in a follow-up phone call with an investigator that he didn't know much about Discord and that he had asked his son to "dumb this down for me." His son had told him about people called "raiders" who could break into other people's Discord accounts, he said. "They can make it basically say whatever they want to about you," Gray said his son had explained.
Colt told the investigator that he had not used Discord in months and was only on TikTok to watch videos. The investigator ended one interview by telling the teenager, who had just finished seventh grade, to focus on getting good grades.
"It'll set you up for the rest of your life," he said.
In a follow-up phone call with Gray, an investigator told him he wasn't sure they would be able to get to the bottom of who had made the post on Discord. He assured Gray he didn't think Colt was being dishonest and encouraged Gray to make sure his son's identity had not been stolen.
Gray said his son was eager for the situation to be resolved. "He wants to know what happened," he told the investigator.