Georgia officials have released audio footage of 911 calls made from the Apalachee High School during the recent mass shooting. Calls to the Barrow County 911 call center started at just after 10.20 am on the morning of the tragedy that left two adults and two teenagers dead. Among the footage were calls from parents who phoned 911 to say their kids were trapped in a perilous situation. “My daughter is calling me crying. Somebody go, ‘boom, boom, boom, boom,” one panicked parent said.
There were so many simultaneous calls to the Barrow County center that lines got backed up, and people endured long waits to get through. One man reported waiting ten minutes to speak with an operator. Authorities also released more than 500 calls and communications between first responders on the day but announced that several 911 calls were unpublished because they featured the “speech or cries of minors.”
Fourteen-year-old Colt Gray shot four people in the 45th school shooting in the United States in 2024. Records show that the first call came from a “RapidSOS” device at 10:22 am, and two minutes later, a second call identified the shooter as “Colt” and confirmed that one person had died. A record at 10.30 am noted that the suspect was “in custody, not injured,” but fifteen minutes after that, three more people were reported as “dead in a hallway.”
At 11.45, a woman called 911 to say she was Colt Gray’s aunt, and she was concerned that her nephew may be involved in the school shooting that was sending shockwaves through the region as it unfolded. She gave the operators her sister’s phone number and asked that someone call her, adding, “I’m just so worried what’s about going to happen.”
Marcee Gray, the suspect’s mother, later revealed that she had received a text message from her son saying, “I’m sorry, Mom.” She said her gut told her something terrible had happened, and she phoned the school to ask someone to check on his welfare. Ms. Gray described her conversation with a school counselor, who told her that one of Colt’s teachers had previously expressed concerns about him – specifically that she worried he would carry out a school shooting.
