WINDER, Ga. — Colt Gray, the baby-faced Georgia school shooting suspect accused of killing two classmates and two teachers, grew up in a broken, uncaring home that was regularly visited by police and child welfare services, a former neighbor and homeowner told The Washington Post.
His mother, Marcy, 43, has a lengthy criminal record including arrests for drugs and domestic violence, while his father, Collin, 54, is accused of providing the weapon used in the shooting after allegedly buying his troubled son an AR-15 rifle as a Christmas gift.
Lauren Vickers, who lived next door to the Grays in Jefferson, Georgia, said when the Grays and their three children moved into their well-maintained neighborhood 60 miles east of Atlanta in 2022, “problems immediately arose.”
“There were nights when my mother would lock my son and his sister out of the house, and the boys would be banging on the back door, screaming, 'Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!' and crying. It was just horrible,” she said.
Vickers said her youngest child sometimes comes into the backyard looking for food.
“I don't have any clean clothes, and I'm not exaggerating.”
“The abuse was ongoing,” she said. “It's really sad.”
Colt, 14, was charged as an adult Thursday with four counts of murder following the shooting Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Winder.
He is due to appear in court on Friday.
Colt's aunt, Annie Brown, told The Washington Post that her nephew suffered from mental illness and had been “seeking help from those around him” in the months before the massacre.
“The adults around him let him down,” she said.
His mother, Marcy, who attended Georgia Southern University and listed her occupation on LinkedIn as a “quality control engineer” for a local manufacturer, also has a lengthy criminal record spanning 17 years and criminal convictions in four Georgia counties. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Her criminal history includes domestic violence, drug possession, criminal damage and various traffic offenses, including DUI, and she was jailed in Ben Hill County as recently as April on a civil fraud charge related to the purchase of a used car.
She has since moved out of her family home, according to her social media accounts and neighbors.
Vickers said Colt's father, Colin, works in construction.
Neither parent responded to The Washington Post's requests for comment.
The Jackson County Sheriff's Office went to the Gray family's home in Jefferson in May 2023 after receiving an FBI report that Colt had threatened to shoot up a middle school on Discord, a messaging app popular among gamers.
However, the case was shelved after a few days after police were unable to confirm key details of the FBI investigation.
Collin admitted to officers that he kept several hunting rifles in the home and that Colt occasionally had supervised access to them. Officers urged him to store the firearms in a locked location and advised him not to send Colt to school “until this issue was resolved,” even though school was already closed for the year.
Law enforcement sources told The Post that despite officers' visit in December 2023, Collin had purchased a Colt AR-style assault rifle as a Christmas gift.
That weapon was used in Wednesday's shooting.
Neighbour Vickers said while the family lived next door, it was the mother who received most of the attention.
“I would find her passed out in the driveway in the early hours of the morning, with the engine running and music blaring,” Vickers said of Marcy, who alleges she was a chronic drug and alcohol abuser.
“His mother would take a little kid to daycare or preschool, that's how she drove him,” she said of Gray's brother.
She said Colt didn't talk much, but she would often see him skipping school and wandering around the woods or an unfinished house in a nearby development.
When asked to describe Colt, Vickers said, “He wasn't a bully or a mean kid. He didn't talk much, he was very quiet,” noting that Colt was a classmate of her daughter, Berlin.
Vickers said she called child welfare services multiple times, but “they just came and talked to me and didn't do anything.”
A former Gray family landlord, who asked not to be named, described Marcy as a “bastard” and praised her father for “trying his best to be a decent man.”
“She had locked them out in bad weather, it was freezing cold,” he said, corroborating Vickers' story.
He said he stopped by the house to talk to Collin after neighbors started complaining.
“The neighbors [Marcee] “She was drunk and driving down the street in her car and fell out of the car with the door open and the engine running. As a landlord, I cannot tolerate this type of behaviour in an area where my tenants could be putting other children at risk,” he said.
“I spoke to my husband and asked him, 'Do you know that the kids are locked out of the house?'”
The homeowner said Collin told him Marcy was battling drug and alcohol addiction and that the couple was heading toward divorce.
He then reported her to the Georgia Department of Family and Children Services and had her removed from the lease. Collin tried to handle the situation on her own, but eventually moved out of her own volition.
“This man must have had a really hard time, his children must have been through a lot of trauma and I can't imagine he wouldn't have sought help,” the homeowner said.
He said that although he had never spoken to Colt, he got the impression that Colt “really wanted to be with his dad.”
When asked about the Apalachee High School shooting, the homeowner said, “I never thought for a second that something like this would happen. You can't predict these things.”
“All I can say is this child did not get the support from the social networks that we should be putting in place to help these children,” he said.
