WINDER, Ga. (Court TV) — Prosecutors say a teenager who pleaded guilty to the murders of four people at his high school left “Easter eggs” in honor of other mass killers whom he’d spent hours researching before carrying out his own attack.
Colt Gray sits in court on July 27, 2026. (Court TV)
Colt Gray, 16, admitted to bringing a gun to Apalachee High School on Sept. 4, 2024, killing two 14-year-old students and two teachers. Nine other people were injured in the shooting. Gray changed his plea to “guilty” on Friday; Gray faces a sentence of life without parole, but Judge Nicholas Primm has the discretion to determine whether the defendant will ever be eligible for parole.
The defense called its first witness on Monday, a forensic psychologist who spent more than 15 hours interviewing Gray after the shooting. “I thought he was kind of an odd kid,” Dr. Kevin Richards said. With no friends in the real world, Gray spent most of his time online, both playing video games and talking to others on Discord and Reddit, Richards said. While on those discussion boards, Gray first became involved in the “True Crime Community,” a group of mostly adolescents who are focused on mass shootings. “I mean, to the point of being obsessed,” Richards said. Gray was specifically focused on James Holmes, who killed 12 people and injured 70 others in a shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado; Nikolas Cruz, who killed 34 people and injured 17 in a school shooting in Parkland, Florida; and Adam Lanza, who killed his mother and then 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
“He was talking a lot about how he kind of related to these people,” Richards said. “He…felt like they had similar histories. I kind of asked him what drew him to it, and he says, ‘Well, you know, Nikolas Cruz was a lonely guy and he had a bad family life and you know, he was depressed and he thought about killing himself and I had all those things too, and so I felt like I could relate to him.’ And so it eventually kind of turned into an obsession.”
Gray spoke to police after his arrest, telling them that he had been hearing voices and had been struggling with his mental health in the moments before opening fire inside the building. “I was doing my best not to do this horrible s—, dude,” he said. “I even tried, I tried to call the hotline in the bathroom, but it didn’t go through.”
Prosecutor Brad Smith said Gray never called any hotline and suggested that he had adopted the story from Holmes — who had called a hotline from his car before carrying out the shooting in Colorado. Other similarities to Cruz’s and Lanza’s crimes were completely intentional, Snith said.
Gray admitted that he destroyed his computer’s hard drive and left it in the middle of his room before going to school with a weapon; Smith said that wasn’t paranoia — that was a re-enactment of what Lanza did in Sandy Hook.
Smith said those acts, plus Gray’s false claims that he’d been wearing “purplish” gloves during the shooting — like Kyle Rittenhouse, per Smith — were “Easter eggs” meant to attract attention among the defendant’s online friends.
On Aug. 31, Gray started talking about something “big” that would happen on Sept. 4, but refused to reveal his plan. Talking to his friend online, Gray said it was “Something I have for Nik,” referring to Cruz. On Sept. 2, Gray wrote, “3 days, nik is gonna be in LOVE with us.” When the friend asked Gray why he had chosen Sept. 4, he said “Nik chose the 14th,” referencing Cruz’s Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting. Gray pointed out that both Sept. 4, 2024, and Feb. 14, 2018, were Wednesdays.
Other messages pulled from Gray’s conversations on Discord show he watched Cruz’s sentencing — but sympathized with the killer, not his victims. Referring to one victim, Gray wrote, “God, I hated the black-haired b—. … Nik should have blown your f—ing brains out.”
Richards testified that Gray was diagnosed with a mood disorder, depression with psychotic features, unspecified personality disorder, conduct disorder and PTSD. But when pressed by prosecutors, Richards conceded that it wasn’t mental illness that led Gray to open fire at school. “I don’t think he was driven by hallucinations or delusions to do what he did,” Richards said. “I think he planned it out.”
