Gun owners should note that another case, this one in Georgia, is connecting parents to the misuse of their firearms in school shootings.
On Nov. 21, prosecutors charged 54-year-old Colin Gray, the father of the 14-year-old suspect in the Sept. 4 Georgia high school shooting in which two students and two teachers were killed and many others injured.
Georgia authorities arrested Gray on allegations that he had allowed his son to possess the weapon used in the Apalachee High School shooting. Gray pleaded not guilty to 29 charges ranging from second-degree murder to reckless conduct.
Colt Gray, 14, has been charged as an adult and was indicted on 55 counts.
On Dec. 4, Colin Gray’s attorneys filed a dismissal motion challenging the indictment on grounds that it “fails adequately to charge this defendant with any offense against the laws of the State of Georgia.”
The elder Gray’s indictment follows the Crumbley sentencing in Michigan earlier this year. In April 2024, the parents of the teenager who killed four students in the 2021 school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, were each sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison after being convicted of manslaughter.
The elder Gray’s charges in Georgia will be another test of whether parents can be held criminally responsible for their children’s actions.
Piedmont Judicial Circuit District Attorney Brad Smith highlighted the unusual nature of the case, noting that it is only the second time in the U.S. and the first time in Georgia that a parent has been charged in connection with a school shooting involving their child.
In the Colin Gray indictment, a grand jury said Gray gave his son “access to a firearm and ammunition after receiving sufficient warning that Colt Gray would endanger the bodily safety of another,” calling it “a substantial and unjustifiable risk.”
Prosecutors alleged that Colin Gray bought his son an AR-15-style rifle as a gift. In the Oxford, Michigan case, 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley committed a mass shooting at his high school in 2021. Ethan Crumbley’s parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, were held partially to blame because they had purchased a semiautomatic handgun for their son.
Apalachee High School is located in Winder, northeast of Atlanta.
