WP Exclusive
The making of an alleged school shooter: Missed warnings and years of neglect
Interviews with family members, along with a review of private texts and public documents, open a window on a 14-year-old’s path to alleged gunman at Georgia’s Apalachee High School.


(Chelsea Conrad/The Washington Post; AP/Brynn Anderson; Courtesy of Debbie Polhamus; Jackson County Sheriff’s Office; Audra Melton)

By Sarah Blaskey, John Woodrow Cox, Hannah Natanson, Laura Meckler and Shawn Boburg
October 3, 2024 at 11:12 a.m. EDT

WINDER, Ga. — Three weeks before Colt Gray became the youngest alleged 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, he told her, his mother was angry and “acting weird again.” His mom had struck him in the past, the grandmother said, recounting the episode to The Washington Post. This time, she said, 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, family members said, using the gun to shove her out of the bedroom and into a wall in the hallway. ... He made a plea to his grandmother that day. ... “I really need you to get my mother out of this house,” he said, according to the grandmother. Later, she would identify that as the moment Colt stopped believing his life would get better. ... 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, according to authorities, the teen used his rifle to kill two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School here in Winder, exposing yet another community to America’s epidemic of campus gun violence. The next day, in this small city just beyond the Atlanta suburbs, his father became the first parent of an alleged school shooter to be charged with murder.

The spiraling path that led Colt to a jail cell offers an extraordinary case study on the making of yet another young man accused of gunning down children in their classrooms and hallways — a story, like so many before it, of neglect, dysfunction and missed or ignored warnings. This account of the circumstances that preceded last month’s bloodshed is based on interviews with family members and officials as well as a review of private messages, police documents and school records.

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A still taken from a Jackson County sheriff’s body camera shows Colt Gray, second from left, answering questions about profane messages relating to a Discord account as his father, Colin Gray, is seated at right. (Jackson County Sheriff’s Office)

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Mary Ann Anderson, Teo Armus, Holly Bailey, Alice Crites, Monika Mathur and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.