Father of Georgia shooter arrested and charged with second-degree murder

U.S. authorities will not hesitate to prosecute the parents of minors who shoot people with weapons they have at hand. They demonstrated it with the pioneering sentences against the parents of a Michigan teen who killed four classmates in 2021. Now they are pressing charges against Colin Gray, the father of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old teenager accused of killing four people on Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. His father faces charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for letting his son possess a weapon, authorities said.

Besides killing fellow students Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, and the math teachers Cristina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall, the shooter wounded nine other people, who required hospital care.

The charges against the shooter’s father stem from the fact that he “knowingly allowed” his son to possess a weapon, Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at a news conference. Colin Gray has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, Hosey said.

According to CNN, Colt’s father told investigators that he had purchased the weapon used in the killings, a semi-automatic rifle, as a holiday gift for his son. “His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation added.

In Georgia, second-degree murder means that a person has caused the death of another person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. It is punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison, while malice murder and felony murder carry a minimum sentence of life. Involuntary manslaughter means that someone unintentionally caused the death of another person.

All nine people who were taken to hospital will make a full recovery, “and that’s a testament to the response that we had, in my opinion, the response that medical staff had,” Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said at a news conference Thursday.

In April, Jennifer and James Crumbley, parents of Ethan Crumbley, were convicted in connection with a mass shooting at a Michigan school. They were sentenced to serve at least 10 years in prison for failing to secure a firearm they had at home and acting indifferently to signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health before he killed four students in 2021.

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The student accused of killing four people in Georgia on Wednesday admitted during police questioning that he was the shooter. “I did it,” he told investigators, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith told CNN. The boy was read his Miranda rights and “kept talking,” he said. The teen is being prosecuted as an adult. Police released his mugshot images Thursday.

Colt Gray was questioned by police more than a year ago after he came on the FBI's radar following threats posted on the gamer-friendly social network Discord. The teen denied making threats to carry out a school shooting when authorities interviewed him last year, according to a sheriff's report obtained Thursday.

Conflicting evidence about the post’s origin prevented investigators from arresting anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and found nothing that would have warranted filing charges at the time. “We did all we could do with what we had at the time,” she told AP.

When a sheriff's investigator in neighboring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy had struggled with his parents' separation and was often picked on at school. The teen frequently shot guns and hunted with his father, who photographed him with deer blood on his cheeks.

“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,” Colin Gray said, according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff’s office.

The attack was the latest in dozens of school shootings across the United States in recent years, including particularly deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have sparked heated debates over gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children grow up accustomed to active-shooter drills. But there have been few changes to national gun laws.