Just months after an unprecedented parental conviction in Michigan, Georgia prosecutors allege a father’s actions led to a mass school shooting.
Colin Gray never pulled a trigger at Apalachee High School — where a mass shooting this week left two 14-year-old students and two math teachers dead — but he could still spend the rest of his life behind bars for murder.
The 54-year-old father appeared in a Georgia courtroom Friday morning on second-degree murder charges that stem from allegations his 14-year-old son carried out the attack and later told investigators, “I did it.”
The father, prosecutors allege, was the gun supplier. Gray bought his son an AR 15-style rifle as a holiday gift in December 2023 “with knowledge he was a threat to himself and others,” according to an arrest affidavit obtained by CNN. Then, the boy used that same gun, police allege, to kill his classmates and two teachers, and injure nine others. Like those before it, the shooting left a much wider swath of trauma that District Attorney Brad Smith referred to Friday.
“You don’t have to have been physically injured in this to be a victim,” Smith said outside the Barrow County courthouse, “Everyone in this community is a victim. Every child in that school was a victim.”
[Related: A history of holding parents responsible for their kids’ crimes]
The charges fall in line with a law enforcement strategy that’s emerged in the last year to thwart a record number of mass school shootings, which federal data show are most often carried out by aggrieved students with guns obtained — either as a gift or without permission — from close family members.
Prosecutors have turned their focus to the killers’ parents.
Just months ago, in early April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley were each given decade-long prison sentences in first-of-their-kind convictions: They were held directly accountable for a school shooting that was carried out by their 15-year-old son in 2021 that killed four students.
In both cases, according to prosecutors,
Parents gave gifts to their kids that were later used to commit mass murder despite knowing that their children were on the brink of acting violently.
Still, legal experts said the Crumbley prosecution — which Georgia officials have set the groundwork to replicate — reverses a bedrock legal principle that people cannot be held liable for the actions of others.
“Look, I thought this case could go either way and still when the result came out I was a bit stunned because it’s such a deep legal principle,” Ekow Yankah, a University of Michigan law professor, told The 74 in February after Jennifer Crumbley’s landmark conviction.
“Maybe this kind of case will have an effect,” he said.
“Maybe parents will be more attentive.”
In Michigan, the shooter — who was sentenced to life in prison without parole after pleading guilty — was gifted a 9-millimeter pistol for Christmas that he later celebrated online as “my new beauty.”
Georgia shooting timeline
In Georgia, the timeline that Gray allegedly gave to prosecutors puts his gift weapon purchase just months after investigators questioned the father and son about reported online threats of a school shooting.
Last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation received reports that Gray’s son, then a 13-year-old, posted a threat on the social media site Discord.
He threatened to “shoot up a middle school.”
Local police investigated the tip but failed to link the Discord comments to the teen, even though the account traced back to the boy’s email address. The boy denied making the threats and claimed he deleted the account because it kept getting hacked. Written in Russian, the profile name on the account translated to the last name of the shooter behind the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
The New York Times reported this week that police searching the teen’s room found evidence of his interest in previous mass school shootings, particularly the 2018 killings in Parkland, Florida.
Meanwhile, Colin Gray acknowledged to police he had hunting rifles at home but that his son did not have “unfettered” access to them.
Charges filed against Gray and 14-year-old son
Charges filed against Gray include four counts of involuntary manslaughter, eight counts of cruelty to children — and two counts of murder in the second degree.
His son, whose age makes him ineligible for the death penalty, will be tried as an adult, prosecutors said, and faces life in prison on four counts of murder. Lawyers for the father and son did not seek bail and the two remained in custody Friday.
[Related: The parents paying for their children’s crimes]
Though the Crumbley case in Michigan presented a novel conviction, it wasn’t the first time a parent has been held legally responsible for crimes committed by their children —including in helping their child secure a firearm later used in a mass shooting. Last year, an Illinois father pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless conduct on charges stemming from a shooting that his son carried out in 2022 at an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago. That case centered on how his son, who was 19 at the time, obtained a gun license.
In Texas, meanwhile, survivors of the 2018 shooting at Santa Fe High School failed last month to hold the gunman’s parents accountable for the carnage. In a civil case filed by survivors and victim’s family members, a jury found Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos were not liable of negligence after being accused of failing to secure their guns at home and ignoring violent warning signs before their 17-year-old son opened fire at his high school and killed eight students and two teachers.
Are recent state firearm measures part of the solution?
Outside of courtrooms, other firearm measures passed at the state level in recent years have sought to tackle parents’ role in mass casualty events carried out by their offspring. More than half of states now have laws requiring gun owners to keep their weapons locked up or that penalize them if a child gains access.
According to an Everytown for Gun Safety tally,
Georgia lacks both secure storage and child-access laws.
A new state law, however, seeks to incentivize parental responsibility.
Effective July 1, the new law extends a tax break to gun owners who purchase firearm safety devices like gun safes and trigger locks. A similar incentive was rolled out in Virginia in 2023, providing a tax break of up to $300. In its first year, nearly 2,000 people accepted the deal.
6 tips: What families need to know about how to safely store firearms at home
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Mark Keierleber is a New York-based, award-winning, investigative journalist at The 74. With expertise in research, data analysis and narrative writing he covers education, juvenile justice, criminal justice, civil rights, immigration, surveillance, security and technology.
This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.
