The father of the 14-year-old accused of the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia faces two second-degree homicide charges in connection with last week’s attack that left four dead.
The case against Colin Gray, 54, marks only the second time in the United States that a parent has been charged in connection with a mass shooting carried out by a minor child. The charges—including four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of child cruelty, with more possible—are the most severe ever brought against a parent of an alleged school shooter.
The prosecution argues that the father “provided a firearm to Colt Gray knowing that he was a threat to himself and others.”
Colin Gray could face up to 180 years in prison if convicted on all charges.
At the center of the case against Gray will be (1) an interaction that the father and son had with police more than a year before last Wednesday’s shooting; (2) the teenager’s access to the weapon used in the attack; and (3) what the father knew about the boy’s mental state, experts told CNN.
In May 2023, police questioned Colt and his father about online threats “to commit a school shooting,” the FBI said. Colt denied making the threats at the time, and his father told authorities that his son did not have unsupervised access to hunting guns at home.
Just seven months later, the suspect’s father purchased the firearm allegedly used in the mass shooting as a Christmas gift for his son, according to police sources. The AR-15 style rifle was bought at a local gun store.
The charges against Gray come just five months after the parents of the teenager who killed four students in a school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, in 2021 were sentenced to between 10 and 15 years in prison on involuntary manslaughter charges.
James and Jennifer Crumbley were the first parents to be criminally held accountable for a mass shooting committed by their child at a school.
“What the Michigan case did was alert the world and the country that, as parents, if you are in possession of a firearm, you are responsible for your child’s actions,” former New York prosecutor and criminal defense attorney Bernarda Villalona told CNN.
“You have to be aware of what your child’s capabilities are, what they are going through, what access they have to those firearms that are capable of causing death.”
Source: CNN