WINDER, Ga. — The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of shooting 4 people and wounding nine others at a Georgia highschool was arrested Thursday. He faces charges including second-degree murder and manslaughter for allowing his son to own a gun, authorities said.
It is the newest example of prosecutors blaming parents for his or her children's actions at school shootings. In April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley became the primary to be convicted in a U.S. school massacre, sentenced to no less than 10 years in prison for failing to secure a firearm at home and reacting indifferently to signs of their son's deteriorating mental health before he killed 4 students in 2021.
Colin Gray, 54, the daddy of Colt Gray, has been charged with 4 counts of manslaughter, two counts of first-degree murder and eight counts of kid abuse, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference.
“These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a firearm,” Hosey said. “His charges are directly related to his son's actions and his allowing him to possess a firearm.”
In Georgia, second-degree murder signifies that an individual caused the death of one other person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, no matter intent. The punishment for that is 10 to 30 years in prison, while premeditated murder and deliberate murder carry a minimum sentence of life in prison. Manslaughter signifies that someone unintentionally causes the death of one other person.
Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with murder within the attack that took place Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta. Arrest warrants obtained by the AP accuse him of using a semi-automatic assault rifle within the attack that killed two students and two teachers and injured nine others.
A sheriff's report obtained Thursday shows the teenager denied threatening to perform a college shooting last yr when authorities questioned him a few threatening social media post.
Due to conflicting evidence concerning the origin of the post, investigators were unable to arrest anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and located nothing that might have warranted charges on the time.
“We didn't fail here at all,” Mangum said in an interview with the Associated Press. “We did everything we could with what we had at the time.”
When a sheriff's investigator from neighboring Jackson County interviewed Gray last yr, his father said the boy had struggled along with his parents' separation and was often bullied in school. The teenager often fired guns and went hunting along with his father, who photographed him with deer blood on his cheeks.
“He knows how dangerous guns are, what they can do and how to use them and how not to use them,” Colin Gray said, in line with a transcript from the sheriff's office.
The teen was questioned 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 amongst video gamers, in line with the sheriff's office incident report.
The FBI's tip pointed to a Discord account linked to an email address related to Colt Gray, the report said. But the boy said “he would never say something like that, not even in jest,” the investigator's report said.
In the transcript of the interview, the teenager is quoted as saying, “I promise I would never say anything where…”, with the remaining of this denial reported as inaudible.
The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because there have been “inconsistent details” concerning the Discord account. The account contained profile information in Russian and a digital trail of evidence indicated that the account had been accessed in various cities within the US state of Georgia in addition to in Buffalo, New York.
The attack was the newest in a series of dozens of faculty shootings within the United States lately, including particularly deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have sparked heated debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of oldsters whose children are growing up practicing school shootings. But little has modified in national gun laws.
Classes were canceled on the Georgia highschool on Thursday, but some people still got here to put flowers across the flagpole and kneel within the grass with their heads bowed.
When the suspect sneaked out of math class on Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath assumed her quiet classmate, who had recently modified schools, was skipping school again. But he later returned and tried to return into the classroom. Some students tried to open the locked door, but backed away as a substitute.
“I suspect they saw something but for some reason didn’t open the door,” Sayarath said.
The teenager then opened fire within the hallway, authorities said.
Sayarath said she heard a volley of 10 to fifteen shots. Students fell to the bottom and crawled away in quest of a secure place to cover.
Two school security officers confronted the shooter minutes after the shooting was reported, Hosey said. The teenager immediately surrendered.
Gray was being held at a regional juvenile penitentiary on Thursday. His first court appearance was scheduled for Friday morning.
According to Hosey, he was charged with the deaths of scholars Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo (each 14) in addition to teachers Richard Aspinwall (39) and Christina Irimie (53).
At least nine other people – eight students and a teacher on the Winder school – were injured and brought to hospitals. All are expected to survive, said Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith.
Authorities haven’t given a motive or explained how the suspect obtained the gun and brought it into the varsity of about 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the outskirts of Atlanta's ever-expanding metropolitan area.
According to a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in collaboration with Northeastern University, it was the thirtieth mass murder within the United States this yr. At least 127 people died in these killings, that are defined as events during which 4 or more people die inside 24 hours, not including the killer – the identical definition utilized by the FBI.
Cases have already emerged where someone who was once on the FBI's radar but was not arrested later committed violent acts.
A month before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at a highschool in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, the FBI received a warning that he had talked about committing mass murder. The FBI also followed up on a lead on the person later convicted of a fatal 2022 shooting at a gay club in Colorado.
This pattern underscores the challenges law enforcement faces in determining when worrisome behavior turns into a criminal offense. Investigators sift through tens of hundreds of suggestions annually to find out which of them might pose a serious threat. Cases just like the Georgia school shooting raise recent questions on whether more intensive investigative work could have prevented the violence.
The sheriff's report states that Investigator Daniel Miller spoke with the boy and his father on May 21, 2023. The father said his son had access to weapons in the home.
“I mean, they're not loaded, but they're down,” Gray's father said, in line with the transcript of the interview.
He captioned a photograph on his phone from a recent hunting trip along with his son: “You can see him with blood on his cheeks because he shot his first deer.” Gray's father called it “the greatest day ever.”
The teenager told Miller that he stopped using Discord just a few months ago after his account was hacked.
“I have to take you at your word and hope you are honest with me,” Miller replied.
The sheriff's office asked local schools to proceed monitoring the teenager, however the investigator concluded that he “could not confirm the tip I received from the FBI to take further action.”
This story corrects the death toll at Sandy Hook Elementary to 26, not 20.
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Martin reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writers 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.
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