Until he’s convicted, we have to call him “the alleged Apalachee High School killer” or some variation that includes the word “alleged.” Doing otherwise opens us up to all kinds of lawsuits if it turns out literally everyone reporting on this, from the mainstream media to law enforcement, got it wrong and the kid is somehow innocent.

That doesn’t seem particularly likely, especially in this case. After all, it seems even his family has accepted that he murdered four people and injured nine others last week.

That includes his mother, who reportedly tried to warn school officials just before the shooting started.

The mother of suspected Apalachee High School shooter [name redacted] told her family that she called her son’s school to warn them of an ‘extreme emergency’ on the morning that he allegedly killed four people. 

Marcee Gray, the alleged shooter’s mother, was seen in text messages shared by The Washington Post telling her family: ‘I told them it was an extreme emergency and for them to go immediately and find [my son] to check on him.’ 

The outlet reported that a call log from the family’s shared phone plan shows Gray made a 10-minute call to the school at 9:50am on Wednesday, about half an hour before Colt allegedly opened fire. 

Marcee’s father, Charles Polhamus, told The New York Post that Colt had delivered an apology to his mother via text message prior to the shooting, prompting her to call the school.

‘I’m sorry, mom,’ the text read. 

Marcee then hopped in her car and started driving toward the school, more than three hours away. But about half way there she learned that the tragedy she was racing to prevent had already taken place.

A counselor at the school told Marcee that her son had been talking about school shootings that morning, according to Gray’s sister Annie Brown who spoke to The Post.

Soon after the shooting began, reports surfaced that Apalachee High School received a warning that the tragedy could unfold. 

In reported texts sent by Marcee, she told her family: ‘I was the one that notified the school counselor at the high school.’ 

Now, a half-hour isn’t a lot of time, but if this kid had been talking about school shootings that morning and his mother called the school and said something is very wrong, then that raises a lot of questions about what the heck was happening inside Apalachee High School that morning.

Maybe it’s just me, and I have the benefit of hindsight, but if someone is talking about school shootings and their mom calls and says there’s something wrong, then perhaps school officials should pull the kid aside, check with them, and use the authority the courts have given school officials to look for something like, oh, I don’t know…a firearm?

But they didn’t.

I’ll admit that school shootings are a weird thing in the United States. On one hand, they seem way too common. On the other, they’re actually fairly rare when you consider how many schools we have in this country and the vast majority of them will never be touched by any such tragedy. It’s easy to see how there was a case of “it can’t happen here” at work.

Yet it did.

This is something that someone will probably need to answer for.

As for the alleged killer’s mother, she at least seems to have done this one thing right. It also sounds like she lives too far away to have played a role in buying a disturbed kid who had been investigated for threatening a school shooting an AR-15 to somehow make things better, so that’s another point in her favor.

It’s only a shame she didn’t get the word sooner, wasn’t taken more seriously, or whatever other breakdown happened.