It was just the two of them, the teenager and his father, since an eviction a year earlier ended with the boy’s parents parting ways in a separation that fractured the entire family.

That’s what Colin Gray told a Georgia sheriff’s investigator who came to his door in May 2023 asking whether an online threat to commit a school shooting had been posted by his son, Colt.

“I don’t know anything about him saying (expletive) like that,” Gray told Jackson County sheriff’s investigator Daniel Miller, according to a transcript of their interview obtained by AP. “I’m going to be mad as hell if he did, and then all the guns will go away.”

Now both Colt, 14, and Colin Gray, 54, are charged in the killings of two students and two teachers on Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta. Nine others were hurt, seven of them shot. The Grays appeared on Friday for the first time in court, where their attorneys declined to seek bail.

The teen is charged with murder, and his father is accused of second-degree murder for providing his son with a semiautomatic, AR 15-style rifle used to kill children. Arrest warrants say the elder Gray did so knowing his son “was a threat to himself and others”.

Jackson County authorities ended their inquiry into Colt Gray a year ago, concluding that there wasn’t clear evidence to link him to a threat posted on Discord, a social media site. The records from that probe provide a narrow glimpse into a boy who struggled with his parents’ breakup.