The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at a high school in the south-eastern US and wounding nine others has been arrested and faces charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for allowing his son to possess a weapon.
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 US mass school shooting. They were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison of not securing a firearm at home and acting indifferently to signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health before he killed killing four students in 2021.
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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 on Thursday (Friday AEST).
“These charges stem from Mr Gray knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a weapon,” Hosey said.
“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon.”
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 causes the death of another person.
Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with murder in the shootings on Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta.
Arrest warrants obtained by the AP accuse him of using a semi-automatic assault-style rifle in the attack, which killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine other people.
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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 on 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 neighbouring 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.
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“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 interview transcript quotes the teen as saying: “I promise I would never say something where …” with the rest of that denial listed as inaudible.
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 attack was the latest among dozens of school shootings across the US 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 cancelled on Thursday at the Georgia high school, though some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with heads bowed.
Colt Gray has been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, according to Hosey.
At least nine other people — eight students and one teacher at the school in Winder — were wounded and taken to hospitals.
All were expected to survive, authorities said.
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