The father of the 14-year-old suspected of carrying out a mass shooting at Georgia’s Apalachee High School has been charged in connection with the killings, including on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced on social media Thursday evening.

His son, Colt Gray, was charged with four felony counts of murder and had been “begging for months” for mental health help before he allegedly carried out the attack Wednesday that left four people dead and nine others injured, according to an aunt of his.

He “was begging for help from everybody around him,” Annie Brown, the aunt, told The Washington Post. “The adults around him failed him.”

Brown, who lives in Central Florida, declined to elaborate on the teen’s mental health challenges but said she tried from afar to get him help. In text messages to a relative, she voiced concern last month that her nephew had access to a gun, according to screenshots she provided to The Post; last week, she wrote that her mother — the suspect’s grandmother — had gone to see a counselor at his school to request help, the screenshots show.

He “starts with the therapist tomorrow,” his grandmother wrote in a text message one week before he opened fire on fellow students.

Brown said her nephew’s struggles were exacerbated by a difficult home life. The teen’s mother pleaded guilty to a charge of family violence last December and was ordered to have no contact with Colin Gray, her husband and the suspected shooter’s father, according to Barrow County Superior Court records. Colin Gray’s charges Thursday, including two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, stemmed from knowingly allowing his son to possess a weapon, Chris Hosey, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at a news conference Thursday night.

The family had “previous contacts” with the local child services department, Hosey has previously said.

As investigators continued Thursday looking for a motive for the shooting, the father’s arrest, aunt’s account and other new details contributed to an emerging picture of the suspect and underlined questions about whether key authority figures — including in his family and in law enforcement — may have missed warning signs and chances to prevent the tragedy at Apalachee.

The teen had also come to the attention of law enforcement officers in Georgia who were pursuing an FBI tip about online threats to open fire at a school more than a year before the shooting at Apalachee. At the time, in May 2023, the teen’s father told the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office that his son was not allowed to use guns without supervision, according to records of the office’s investigation obtained by The Post. The teen told officers that he was concerned that anyone would suggest he would threaten to “shoot up a school, stating that he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” the records show.

In a search of the suspect’s home after the shooting at Apalachee High, authorities found writing referencing past school shootings, including the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Neither Gray’s parents nor his grandmother have commented publicly. The Post’s efforts to reach them for comment were unsuccessful. A spokesperson for Barrow County school district did not respond to requests for comment.

The 2023 investigation that brought investigators from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office into contact with Colt Gray was spurred by threatening comments made on the social media platform Discord, the records obtained by The Post show. The comments came from an account associated with an email address that the FBI believed was owned by Gray, the records say.

The teen told officers he had previously used Discord but got rid of his account months earlier “because too many people kept hacking his account and he was afraid someone would use his information for nefarious purposes,” the records show.

The Discord account flagged by the FBI in 2023 featured a profile name written in Russian that, when translated, spelled out “Lanza,” referring to Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooter, according to the records.

Colin Gray told investigators at the time that he was unfamiliar with Discord and said he had no knowledge of the email address associated with the Discord account that made threats. He also said that his son “does not know or speak Russian,” according to the records.

He told officers that he allowed his son to use his hunting rifles when supervised but that the child, who was 13 at the time, did not have “unfettered access to them.” The weapons were kept in the house, according to the report.

The records show that one officer said he urged the man to keep the firearms locked away and advised him on May 21 of last year to “keep the teen out of school until the matter could be resolved.”

Also on May 21, 2023, Discord removed an account believed to be associated with the suspect, according to Jud Hoffman, Discord’s vice president of trust and safety. The account, created weeks earlier on April 2, violated the company’s policy against extremism, Hoffman said. Discord cooperated with law enforcement at the time and has no indication that the suspect used the platform to plan the attack on Apalachee, Hoffman said.

On May 23, two days after first interviewing with the Grays, the investigator noted that the case would be “exceptionally cleared” because the tip alleging Colt Gray’s role in the threat could not be substantiated. Officers were unable to confirm that the Discord account was linked to Colt Gray, and information included in the FBI tip was “unreliable,” the records say. The officers noted in the report that the FBI tip included a brief physical description of the suspect that did not match the teen’s appearance. The source of the physical description was unclear in the records.

At the time, Jackson County officials alerted “local schools for continuing monitoring of the subject,” Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said in a statement Wednesday. FBI’s Atlanta office said in a statement that there was no probable cause for arrest or any further law enforcement action.

At the time of Jackson County’s investigation, the teen’s father told officers that he and his wife had split up after their family was evicted from their home a few months earlier. The father said he and his son had moved and that, while his son had experienced “some problems” at the middle school he previously attended, things had “gotten a lot better” now that he was attending a new school.

It is unclear when the teenager stopped attending that school, Jefferson Middle School in Jefferson, Ga.

The following year was one of legal turmoil for his mother, Marcee Gray. In early November, she was arrested during a traffic stop and accused of possessing methamphetamine, fentanyl and muscle relaxants. An arrest warrant signed by a deputy with the Barrow County Sheriff’s office also claimed Gray had a glass pipe used for the injection of narcotics and had concealed the identity of the Nissan Rogue she was driving by affixing a tag for a Nissan Kick.

Court records show Marcee Gray, 43, was ultimately not charged for drug possession and pleaded guilty Dec. 21 to the license plate violation. That same day, Gray also pleaded guilty to a single count of criminal trespass/family violence and criminal damage to property in the second degree – though details of the incident that led to those charges and when it took place were not revealed in publicly available court records.

Marcee Gray was sentenced to five years in jail, with the first 46 days to be spent in confinement and the remainder on probation. As a condition of her probation, she was prohibited from having any contact with her husband, Colin Gray, except through a third party for matters concerning their children or divorce, according to her guilty plea. She was ordered to participate in a family violence intervention program and to abstain from drugs and alcohol.

She was also ordered to pay more than $1,500 in restitution to Atlanta-based Van Winkle Construction. Colin Gray listed that company as his employer on his LinkedIn profile, but it was not immediately clear if he was still working there. Shane Hornbuckle, a company executive, did not respond to a request for comment.

A related court order in April noted that Marcee Gray was at the time in custody at the Ben Hill County Jail in Fitzgerald, Ga. — three hours south of Atlanta where members of her family live. Court records in Ben Hill County were not immediately available, but a crime report published Jan. 3 indicated that Gray had been arrested by local police on charges of aggravated battery, theft by taking, criminal trespass, false imprisonment and failure to appear.

Brown, Gray’s aunt, said that in January — amid this tumultuous period — she helped her nephew enroll at Haymon-Morris Middle School in Barrow County so he could finish eighth grade following a period of absenteeism.

He had just started ninth grade at Apalachee High this school year, she said.

Law enforcement authorities have confirmed that he was a student at Apalachee, and a classmate there described him to CNN on Wednesday as quiet and often absent from class. The school district spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on his prior enrollment history.

Brown said that since the shooting, she has been praying for “the families who have been affected because of my nephew’s actions.”

She said she would also continue to support her nephew. Without excusing his actions, Brown said he was still “just a baby” who was never given the mental health support he needed and repeatedly requested.

Bailey reported from Winder, Ga. Alice Crites, Chris Dehghanpoor, Perry Stein and Pranshu Verma contributed to this report.

previous coverage

• Father of Georgia school shooting suspect arrested on charges including second-degree murder
• 14-year-old student fatally shoots 4 people in rampage at Georgia high school, officials say