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Colin Gray, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, has filed a motion to be separated from the other inmates in jail after getting an “incalculable number of threats.”
Gray is accused of giving his son an AR-15-style firearm as a Christmas gift last year, months after the FBI interviewed the father and son over threats he allegedly made online about school shootings.
That gun was allegedly used in the attack at the Georgia school on September 4 that killed two students and two teachers.
Gray is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and is being held without bond at the Barrow County Detention Center.
In the motion 11Alive obtained from the Superior Court of Barrow County, Gray’s attorneys have asked for him to be separated from the general population for safety reasons.
“It is certain that those feelings of anger and retribution manifested in the collective psyche, of both the public and the community at large are not also represented in the individuals currently incarcerated with the Defendant at the Barrow County Detention Center,” the motion states.
“In fact, so many lives in the community of Barrow County have been touched in unfathomable ways, it would be reckless to assume there are NO inmates, either currently or in the near future, being housed in the Barrow County Detention, who wish to harm the Defendant.”
The attorneys stated that due to the nationwide national media coverage, Gray has received an “incalculable number of threats.”
Gray made his first appearance in court on September 6. It is unknown when a ruling will be made on the motion.
The motion comes one week after the attack allegedly carried out by Colin’s 14-year-old, Colt.
Colt Gray was also taken into custody and has been charged as an adult with four counts of felony murder for the killings of fellow students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and high-school teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53.
Colt was reportedly “obsessed” with school shootings, and investigators quizzed him last year over online threats he’d made about one.
His dad owned up to having guns in the family home, telling an investigator in FBI audio footage last year: “There’s nothing —nothing loaded. But they are [in the house]. We actually do a lot of shooting, we do a lot of deer hunting. He shot his first deer this year.”
And when authorities searched the suspect’s bedroom at his home, they found documents believed to be written by him that referenced the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, where Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people and wounded 17 others. Law enforcement sources told The New York Times the teen was “obsessed” with the shooting.
More charges are expected against Colt Gray, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
