Georgia school shooter was obsessed with True Crime Community (TCC)
While sitting in jail after shooting 13 classmates and teachers, Colt Gray asked his mother to search online for mentions of his name in “true crime community” and print fan art photos of him.
Last Friday, Colt Gray, now 16, pleaded guilty to 55 felony counts in the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High. Two students and two teachers were killed. Seven others were wounded and two more were hurt fleeing from the school. This week, witnesses and families gave final testimony providing new info about the case. He was sentenced today to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
During the first police interview after the Apalachee High school shooting, Colt Gray (14-years-old at the time) lied to investigators. He claims that before the attack he:
Called the suicide hotline
Smashed his computer and left it in the middle of this bedroom
Colt didn’t do either of these things. Before the Aurora movie theater shooting during the Batman premier, James Holmes called the suicide hotline. Before the Sandy Hook school shooting, Adam Lanza smashed his computer.
Colt was lying to the police because he wanted these details to leak out and make their way into the True Crime Community (TCC). Leaving easter eggs as a homage high profile mass shooters would get him status within his online community. Just like a real Swiftie need to spot all the hidden messages in Taylor’s newest album, TCC members who know every detail about Holmes and Lanza would admire Colt for showing he was a true mass shooting superfan.
From everything I’ve read, Colt’s goal wasn’t to be the deadliest school shooter in history. What he wanted was to have the same level of recognition and status in the TCC as his idol Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland school shooter. Police found more than 2,000 photos of Cruz on Colt’s phone and a dozen printed fanart pictures of Cruz in Colt’s bedroom. The day before the attack, he shared photos of a “shrine” to Cruze in his Discord group.
During Colt’s phone calls from jail (video clip below, full version here), he asked his mother to search online for TCC fanart and posts mentioning him. Colt was upset about how his mugshot looked and asked his mother to create a Tumbler account to post “cuter photos” of him. In subsequent calls, Colt and his mother get excited by how many likes his photos are getting. At 3:55 in this video, they talk about how Colt is more popular than 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, the man who attempted to shoot the president in Butler, PA.
I also believe that the ‘No Notoriety’ movement to keep the names and faces of mass shooters out of mainstream media resulted in parents who are clueless about what their kids are looking at online.
In another recorded jail phone call, Apalachee High school shooter Colt Gray’s mom describes a TCC quiz to guess the mass shooter with the most annoying fans.
As she reads the names to her son, she says “Brenton. Brenton Tarrant?” Colt explains he is the New Zealand Christchurch mosque shooter who killed 51 people. From Colt’s tone, he can’t believe his mom doesn’t know who these people are. If a kid is committing self harm, talking about suicide, obsessed with guns, and deep into online mass shooter fan communities, it’s the responsibility of a parent to know who mass shooters are! Colt then describes the Russian mass shooters as “so cringe”.
She finishes out the list of “Eric, Dylan, Adam, Andrew, Randy, Elliot, Artyom, Nikita, Brenton, Cho, and....Colt”.
Colt proudly says to his mom: “I’m on there? I’m in the big leagues, bro”.
There has been a huge shift in the patterns of online radicalization of the last 3 years. The old pathway to violence paradigm doesn’t apply to these TCC cases and the last ~18 school shooters in the US, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Philippines, Turkey, and Indonesia are idolizing the same people and trying to gain status within this online community.
During the phone conversations, Colt didn’t ask what CNN, the NYT, or mainstream media was writing about him. School shootings are no longer about widespread notoriety, getting live coverage on CNN, or having the highest “kill count”. The only thing Colt really cared about was having status in TCC on social media. And his plan worked.
TCC Fanart of Colt
Colt got what he wanted, mainly because the social media platforms enabled it. A quick search of TikTok results in an endless scroll of TCC fanart and views of Colt.
TCC is about the idolization and romanticization of mass shooters, especially the “cute” ones. The image below encapsulates basically everything about the community. Colt is cartoonified into Anime-style with a flirty side-eyes look and his tongue sticking out. He is lusting over an AR-15 (rifle he used during the shooting).
There are also notebook drawings. These are even more disturbing because someone had to take the time to sketch this on paper instead of just feeding an AI model like ChatGPT or Gemini a prompt to make custom school shooter fanart.
There is also some weird stuff which I’ll admit that I don’t totally understand. In the photo below, he has an Anime-style ahoge haircut (Japanese for “foolish hair”) and blushed cheeks with a confused (derp) expression.
So yeah, this is all out there and it’s exactly what he wanted to accomplish by killing his classmates.
Prominent researcher admits he was wrong about school shootings
In an unexpected turn of events, an academic researcher who has been advocating for specific strategies to decrease school shootings for decades looked at the K-12 School Shooting Database and decided he was wrong. It’s amazing what happens when people use empirical evidence instead of personal assumptions!
KQED: Scientists rarely announce that one of their long-held ideas has failed.
But that is exactly what Ron Avi Astor, one of the nation’s leading scholars of school violence and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said before fellow researchers at the annual meeting in April of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
“We were wrong,” Astor told the audience.
For decades, Astor believed that improving school climate and reducing bullying would help prevent school shootings. He advised national policymakers and issued recommendations. Schools responded by investing heavily in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming.
Those initiatives have benefited students in many ways. Fewer students report bringing guns or knives to school, and schools have generally become safer.
But school shootings have not declined.
“I’ve had a complete change” in my thinking, Astor told me in an interview after the conference.
That shift came after he stepped back and looked at the evidence. During his AERA presentation, Astor showed a slide with two stark graphs. One traced a steady decline in students bringing weapons to California schools over the quarter century since the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. The other graph showed a sharp rise in school shootings across the nation.
It’s great that a researcher changed his mind. Unfortunately, everything I explained about Colt Gray means this researcher is still wrong about his approach to preventing mass violence.
Astor now believes many perpetrators are driven by a desire for notoriety. Shooters study previous massacres, learn from online communities and seek the publicity that follows a mass attack.
That new way of thinking has led him to a very different recommendation. Rather than focusing on prevention inside schools, Astor believes journalists and social media companies should adopt guidelines that reduce attention on perpetrators, delay publication of manifestos and videos, and focus more coverage on victims.
Astor compares school shootings to suicide contagions or spates of terrorism, where extensive publicity can inspire copycats.
From everything I’ve learned from a dozen TCC-connected school shooters over the last two years, they don’t care about mainstream media or being known (notoriety) to the general public. These teens care about getting more status within a niche extremist community.
School shootings are not contagion which is the involuntary spread of germs between people. School shootings are deliberate and purposeful acts to gain social status within specific communities (see: Social Identity Theory). School shootings are also not acts of terrorism because there isn’t a political change agenda that a group is using violence to advance.
School shooters are kids with chaotic and traumatizing real-world lives who get satisfaction and belonging from becoming part of online communities who obsess over mass violence. Kids like Colt who have really, really, really bad real-world lives decide that shooting up their school can put them on the pedestal with their internet idols. This isn’t contagion or being a copycat, it’s a deliberate effort to gain status in their community.
How to fix this?
More bad news. I was presenting last week about online radicalization at TrustCon (biggest tech trust and safety conference) with people in the audience from every platform (Meta, Google, TikTok, Roblox, Discord, Twitch, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc).
Trust and safety staffers are very worried, but their bosses (and the founders and funders) don’t care. In the current US political climate, banning accounts and blocking content is bad for business. Accounts that share violent gore content and promote school shootings are daily active users who get likes and shares. Platform time and content engagement are the most important profit driving metric in the social media world.
Everyone in tech knows online extremism is a huge problem. But it’s not going to get fixed until there is a different President and different majority in Congress who care about child safety, want to stop instead of promote violence, and are willing to regulate the companies who enable kids like Colt Gray to become school shooters.
More about TCC:
Ep 60. Inside the True Crime Community (TCC) that grooms teens into school shooters. The last 7 school shooters were all connected with the same online group that shares violent gore content, fan art idolizing prior school shooters, and encourages members to commit real-world violence
Ep 57. TCC, gore videos, groypers, and online radicalization
112 TCC-radicalized students identified by police in Jakarta, Indonesia
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my podcast—Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education & Security—or my interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.