Case against Colin Gray, father of Georgia school shooting suspect, tests limits of parental responsibility

Prosecutors’ swift decision to charge the father of the 14-year-old suspect in the Georgia high school shooting will be another test of whether parents can be held criminally responsible for their children’s actions.

The charges against Colin Gray come months after the parents of a Michigan school shooter were convicted of involuntary manslaughter — the first parents in the United States to be convicted in the mass shooting of their child.

Although details of the case against Gray, 54, remain limited, Georgia authorities arrested him Thursday on allegations he allowed his son to possess a gun.

Gray made his first court appearance Friday morning, separately from his son, Colt Gray, 14, who appeared earlier. The judge said the son is charged with four counts of murder in the deaths of two students and two teachers in a shooting Wednesday morning at Apalachee High School in Winder, where the suspect is a freshman. Nine other people were injured in the attack.

Colin Gray rocked back and forth in his chair and looked down during his appearance as the judge announced that he was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of second-degree cruelty to children.

Brad Smith, the Piedmont Circuit attorney, later said at a news conference that he was “not trying to send a message” by charging the parent of a child accused of a mass shooting in Georgia for the first time.

“I hope prosecutors will use every arsenal or every tool at their disposal to hold people accountable for the crimes they commit,” Smith said.

The teenage suspect, who was charged as an adult, was already known to law enforcement.

In May 2023, the father and son were questioned by local authorities in connection with threats of a school shooting, two law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News. But authorities did not arrest the teen because they could not link him to an online account that made the threats, according to investigative documents.

The FBI received information about the school shooting threat from a user on Discord, a popular online chat platform for video gamers. The FBI traced the alleged threat to an account registered to a person with the same name as Colin Gray.

But his son denied making any online threats, and local authorities ultimately determined that the FBI’s information was inconsistent with information uncovered during the investigation, the documents show.

Colin Gray told investigators he taught his son “about guns and safety” and how to hunt, according to transcripts, while the child lived with him while he was separated from his wife.

If his son had indeed made the threats, Gray told investigators he “would be furious and all the guns would be confiscated.”

But at some point after the interaction with authorities, Gray bought his son an AR-15-style rifle as a gift, law enforcement sources said.

There are similarities to the case in Oxford, Michigan, where a 15-year-old committed a mass shooting at his high school in 2021.

His parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, were held partially responsible, with Oakland County prosecutors convincing jurors in their separate trials this year that they repeatedly ignored warning signs that a “reasonable person” would have recognized, including their son’s deteriorating mental health and social isolation, and that they could have done more to prevent their son from having access to a gun. The parents had bought a semi-automatic pistol as an early Christmas present.

The Crumbleys were eventually sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.

But the charges against Gray are much more severe, and the judge said Friday that he faces a maximum total of 180 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

Smith said Friday that the second-degree murder charge against Gray focused on “cruelty to children,” and he was charged with two counts in connection with the two students who were killed.

The four manslaughter charges are based on the four deceased victims, Smith said, and may depend on whether someone engaged in “reckless conduct.”

Georgia law prohibits the sale or provision of pistols and revolvers to minors under the age of 18, although there may be limited exceptions allowing minors to handle firearms, such as during a hunting course, at a shooting range, or on parental property with permission.

Smith declined to say whether Gray had gun locks or other mechanisms to secure his firearms inside the home.

J. Tom Morgan, a former prosecutor in DeKalb County, Georgia, who teaches criminology at Western Carolina University, said he would expect Gray’s defense to seek to have the charges dismissed.

But even though Georgia, unlike other states, does not have a law requiring “safe storage” of firearms to prevent children from having access to them, Morgan said parents still have an obligation to make sure guns are not easily accessible, especially when their child may have a propensity to commit violence.

“I grew up in a rural community in Georgia where the Second Amendment is very strongly supported,” Morgan said, “but the people I know, the hunters, are very responsible. If you’re going to own a gun, you have to do it responsibly.”

Andrew Fleischman, a criminal defense attorney in Georgia, said the case against Gray will come down, in part, to whether prosecutors can establish that he consciously disregarded the substantial and unjustifiable risk that other minors would suffer excessive physical or emotional pain.

“If the father bought his son a gun knowing that his son had threatened to shoot his classmates, he willfully ignored that risk,” Fleischman said. “The risk is likely significant because of the prior threats, and the act is unjustifiable because there is no good reason to buy your teenager” an AR-15-style rifle.

Michael Dezsi, an attorney representing Jennifer Crumbley as she seeks to appeal her conviction, said the Georgia charges are an example of shifting the responsibility onto parents in the absence of states passing meaningful gun laws.

As in the case of the Crumbleys’ son, who pleaded guilty as an adult and was sentenced to life in prison, it is “contradictory,” Dezsi said, to charge the shooters as adults but also hold their parents responsible.

“It’s a very slippery slope and it sets a bad precedent to start charging parents for actions that are more akin to neglect and can be resolved civilly,” he said.

But Karen McDonald, the Michigan prosecutor who filed the complaint against the Crumbleys, said her case was not intended to set a precedent and involved a “set of facts so rare and so egregious” that she hoped it would not happen again.

The Georgia prosecutor’s case is a positive outcome, McDonald told NBC affiliate WDIV, if it “leads people to question where the gun was obtained.”

Still, gun safety groups are expressing concern that another mass shooting may have occurred, despite the high-profile trial in Michigan that drew national attention because the parents of a mass shooter were convicted for the first time.

“This verdict should have sent a clear message to people like Mr. Gray,” Nick Suplina, senior vice president of legal and policy affairs at Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement. “But unfortunately for the victims and their families, it failed to heed that message to prevent a tragedy.”