WINDER, Ga. (AP) — The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at a Georgia high school was arrested Thursday and faces charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for letting his son possess a weapon, authorities said.
It’s the latest example of prosecutors holding parents responsible for their children’s actions in school shootings. In April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley were the first convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting. They were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for not securing a firearm at home and acting indifferently to signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health before he killed four students in 2021.
Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference.
“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Hosey said.
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.
Father and son have been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, according to Hosey. Colt Gray has a first court appearance scheduled Friday, but no proceedings were yet scheduled for his father. Neither Gray appeared in online court records for Barrow County.
Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with four counts of murder in the shootings Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta, Hosey said. Arrest warrants obtained by the AP accuse him of using a semiautomatic assault-style rifle in the attack, which killed two students and two teachers. Nine other people were hurt, seven of them shot.
The teen denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when authorities interviewed him last year about a menacing post on social media, according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday.
Conflicting evidence on the post's origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the report from May 2023 and found nothing that would have justified bringing charges at the time.
“We did not drop the ball at all on this,” Mangum told The Associated Press in an interview. “We did all we could do with what we had at the time.”
When a sheriff's investigator from neighboring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy had struggled with his parents’ separation and often got picked on at school. The teen frequently fired guns and hunted with his father, who photographed him with a deer's 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 teen was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Colt Gray, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the sheriff's office incident report.
The FBI's tip pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to Colt Gray, the report said. But the boy said “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” according to the investigator's report.
The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a digital evidence trail indicating it had been accessed in different Georgia cities as well as Buffalo, New York. The teen said he stopped using the account a few months earlier after it was hacked.
The attack was the latest among dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have set off fervent debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to active-shooter drills. But there has been little change to national gun laws.
Classes were canceled Thursday at the Georgia high school, though some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with heads bowed.
The nine people — eight students and one teacher — who were taken to the hospital after the shooting were all expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.
Isaiah Hooks, an Apalachee High School football player, said he was in a nearby classroom when the shooting started.
“It was rough, just hearing my peers and hearing the sounds, just knowing that people ended up getting hurt,” he said.
He recalled Aspinwall, who was his coach on the team, as a tremendous motivator.
“It was really hard to lose someone that pushed himself to really, like, make us better and make sure that we’re better at what we do,” Hooks said. “He pushed us to be great at what we did.”
Authorities have not offered any motive or explained how the suspect obtained the gun and got it into the school of roughly 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of metro Atlanta’s ever-expanding sprawl.
It was the 30th mass killing in the U.S. so far this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 people have died in those killings, which are defined as events in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.
Prior cases have emerged in which someone who was once on the FBI's radar but was not arrested went on to commit violence.
A month before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at the Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018, the bureau received a warning that he had been talking about committing a mass shooting. The FBI also investigated a tip about the person later convicted in a deadly 2022 shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado.
The pattern underscores the challenges law enforcement faces in trying to determine when concerning behavior crosses into a crime. Investigators sift through tens of thousands of tips every year to try to determine which could yield a viable threat. Cases such as the Georgia school shooting prompt fresh questions about whether more intensive investigative work might have averted the violence.
The sheriff's report says investigator Daniel Miller spoke to the boy and his father May 21, 2023. The father said his son had access to guns in the house.
“I mean they aren't loaded, but they are down,” Gray's father said, according to the interview transcript.
He described a photo on his cellphone from a recent hunting trip with his son: “You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer.” Gray's father called it “the greatest day ever.”
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This story has been updated to correct the death toll at Sandy Hook Elementary to 26, not 20, and the spelling of Cristina Irimie's first name, which authorities initially released as Christina.
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Martin reported from Atlanta. Associated Press journalists Charlotte Kramon, Sharon Johnson, Mike Stewart and Erik Verduzco in Winder; Trenton Daniel and Beatrice Dupuy in New York; Eric Tucker in Washington; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Kate Brumback in Atlanta; and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed.
Jeff Amy And Jeff Martin, The Associated Press
