Why an ominous warning didn't stop Georgia school shooting

Keep your guns locked up.

That’s what sheriff’s deputies told Colin Gray when they came to investigate a school shooting threat in May of 2023. Sixteen months later, Gray’s 14-year-old son Colt is accused of opening fire at his high school, killing two students and two teachers and wounding nine others.

Both Colin Gray and his son are now in custody, with the former charged with second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children because authorities said he gave access to firearms to his son despite knowing he was a threat to others.

Experts say it's unsurprising that the May 2023 investigation didn't prevent this week's tragedy.

There’s only so much law enforcement can do to stop a crime like a mass shooting from occurring in advance, said Adam Winkler, a law professor and gun policy expert at UCLA.

“We have to be realistic about what you can accomplish in a society that has over 400 million guns and they're very easy to obtain,” Winkler said.

Was the FBI tracking the accused shooter?

The notion that the shooting suspect was on the FBI’s “radar” for over a year is a misunderstanding of how law enforcement operates, according to Katherine Schweit, a former FBI agent who created the FBI’s active shooter program.

“Because somebody interacts with law enforcement doesn't give law enforcement the authority – federal, state or local or tribal – to constantly go back into somebody's personal life and check on them and check on them,” Schweit said.

What did law enforcement do in 2023?

The FBI alerted local law enforcement about threats to commit a school shooting made on the online platform Discord. They traced the account that made the threats to an address where Colin Gray and his son previously lived and had since moved from in Jefferson, Georgia.

The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office went to speak with them. The then 13-year-old told investigators at the time that he did not make the threat and that he had deleted his Discord account because it had been hacked, according to a report by the sheriff’s office. When authorities tried to trace the source of the threat further using IP addresses, they said they could not confirm that it was made by the teen. The account appeared to have been accessed from multiple places in the U.S.

Colin Gray told them that he had rifles for hunting in the home, but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them.

“I urged Colin to keep his firearms locked away,” wrote Daniel Miller Jr., lead investigator.