Georgia school shooter Colt Gray sought notoriety, investigator says ahead of sentencing
By Isabel Rosales, Eric Levenson, Danya Gainor, CNN
Winder, Georgia (CNN) — Colt Gray, the Georgia teen who fatally shot four people at his high school in 2024, carried out the attack “to gain some sort of fame or notoriety from it,” Ashley Gilleland, an investigator with the Barrow County District Attorney’s Office, testified Tuesday.
After the shooting, he repeatedly asked his mother to search his name online and bring him “fan art” of himself, according to jail phone calls played in court.
“I’m in the big leagues, bro. And not in a bad way,” he said in one call.
The testimony came on the final day of a three-day sentencing hearing that has featured Colt’s guilty plea, emotional victim impact statements, confession tapes and insight into his motive and mental health.
The teen’s grandmother is expected to testify as prosecutors and defense attorneys debate whether he can ever be rehabilitated. Colt, now 16, will also have a chance to speak before the judge decides whether to sentence him to life in prison with or without the possibility of parole.
The hearing comes nearly two years after Colt carried out the attack at Apalachee High School, the deadliest school shooting in Georgia history.
On the morning of September 4, 2024, school officials and resource officers had gone to intercept the then-14-year-old after he made several concerning comments. But in a stranger-than-fiction mix-up, they confused him with another student named Kolton Gray.
Colt then armed himself with an AR-15-style rifle — which he had brought to school hidden in his backpack — and fired indiscriminately into a math class before shooting several people in the hallway. Teachers Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo were killed, and nine others were injured.
He surrendered to police that day and has remained behind bars since. He pleaded guilty Friday to 55 charges, including four counts of murder.
This hearing is part of an eventful week for the Gray family and the Apalachee community.
Colin Gray, the teen’s father, is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday. He was found guilty of murder and manslaughter charges for purchasing his son the firearm as a Christmas gift and leaving it unsecured in their house despite warnings that Colt was a danger to others, and faces decades in prison.
The following day, about five miles south of the Barrow County Courthouse, students will return to Apalachee High School for the first day of the new school year.
Parents investigated for neglect, abuse
The father’s trial earlier this year revealed the extent of Colt’s tumultuous childhood.
His mother, Marcee Gray, struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, and the family moved repeatedly. School records show he was repeatedly absent from class, including missing his entire eighth-grade year. Family members spoke about Colt’s deteriorating mental health.
His parents had a “plethora of issues” related to child abuse and neglect, Candice Broce, the director of the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, testified on Tuesday.
Last October, Colt was placed into emergency foster care because his mother was violating a court order limiting her contact with him, Broce said. His maternal grandmother, Deborah Polhamus, was named as his guardian.
The no-contact order against Marcee Gray, combined with the start of medication, had “changed him into essentially a different child,” Broce said. He began eating better, sleeping better and was more engaged with juvenile custody programming, she said.
New clues about shooter’s motive
The teen’s journal writings and statements to police show how Colt tried to copy and reference other mass shooters.
In messages read aloud in court Monday, Colt wrote about his longing for fame and his obsession with Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland school shooter.
“(I) wanna make history to put it short,” Colt wrote on the messaging platform Discord more than a year before the shooting. “I want people to remember the pain I caused and research me for hours.”
“My love for Nik has formed into something in which I can find no other resort that can prove my love and affection towards him,” he wrote in a message days before the shooting.
Tony Montalto, president of the advocacy group Stand with Parkland, said in a statement it was “especially painful to learn that he idolized the murderer who attacked our children and spouses and used that tragedy as inspiration.”
Kevin Richards, a forensic psychologist, testified Monday that the teen’s paranoia, depression and anxiety were exacerbated by neglect and abuse at home and an online fixation with mass shooters.
“He was a lonely, dysfunctional kid who was anxious, paranoid, depressed and immersed in this highly dysfunctional world with these people who were obsessed with folks who had done school shootings,” Richards said.
Richards said Colt could improve with proper interventions and medication.
But on cross-examination, Richards said Colt had exaggerated his mental health symptoms and made things up to try to get a more serious diagnosis. Colt did not show signs of mania, insanity, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, Richards said, and there was no evidence he had hallucinations.
On Friday, the courtroom heard recordings of Colt’s interview with investigators less than an hour after the shooting. Sobbing and gasping, he apologized and offered paranoid, hallucinatory explanations for his actions, saying he believed teachers were plotting against him. He also told investigators he believed he should be in a mental health facility.
However, several of his statements were later proved false, including those about where he found the firearm and his claim that he called a suicide hotline before the attack. Barrow County Sheriff’s Office investigator Jason Smith said he believed Colt’s hysterical state was “performative.”
Lasting impacts of the attack
In victim impact statements Friday, family members and survivors stood before the court and described who they were before September 4, 2024, and who they have become since.
“I started to hate myself because I couldn’t truly live anymore, because I let you take every piece of joy I had away from me,” said Nautica Walton, who was in ninth grade when she was shot in the leg.
“I hate everything about you,” she told Colt. “I hate the scars you left on my body. I hate that you took innocent lives in front of innocent people. Most of all, I hate that I let you live in my mind.”
Others acknowledged Colt’s difficult childhood while making clear it could never justify his actions.
“Two things can be true at the same time,” said Sarah Beaver, the mother of shooting survivor Jaxson Beaver. “He was a child who was failed. He was also the person who failed countless innocent children and their families.”
“The defendant’s family will still get to see their son, talk to him and know he is breathing,” said Ismael Angulo Jr., the oldest sibling of victim Christian Angulo. “My mother (and) my father don’t get that privilege. The only way to visit Christian now is by standing over his grave.”
He added: “There is no fairness in that reality.”
CNN’s Andy Rose, Devon M. Sayers, Alaa Elassar, Sarah Hutter and Rebekah Riess contributed to this report.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
