In historic case, father of 14-year-old school shooting suspect charged with murder
Colin Gray, 54, the father of Apalachee High School shooter Colt Gray, 14, enters the Barrow County courthouse for his first appearance, on Friday in Winder, Ga. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Georgia officials charged the father of the suspected Apalachee High gunman with two counts of second-degree murder Thursday—the most severe ever filed against the parent of an alleged school shooter.
The arrest came less than 36 hours after two students and a pair of teachers were gunned down with an AR-15-style rifle that, investigators allege, the man allowed his 14-year-old son to possess.
Along with murder, Colin Gray, 54, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children. His son, Colt Gray, has been charged with four felony counts of murder.
The father “knowingly allowed him to possess the weapon. His charges are directly connected to the actions of his son,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at an evening news conference where he provided no other details on what led to the charging decision—or its remarkable speed.
There were warning signs before Wednesday’s attack, according to law enforcement officials and family members.
A year ago, local investigators interviewed Gray and his son about alleged online threats the teen had made to shoot up a school, accusations that Colt Gray denied at the time. This week, the boy’s aunt, Annie Brown, told The Washington Post that the teen had been “begging” the adults around him for mental health support in recent months.
Before Thursday’s announcement, the teen’s grandfather, Charles Polhamus, said he wanted Colin Gray charged along with his son.
“If he didn’t have a damn gun,” Polhamus said, “he wouldn’t have gone and killed anybody.”
Though Colin Gray is in custody, his case had not been added to the online county court system by late Thursday evening, so it remains unclear who will represent him.
The charges come just months after a mother and father in Michigan became the first parents of a school shooter ever convicted of involuntary manslaughter, a less severe crime than second-degree murder. Investigators found that, in November 2021, James and Jennifer Crumbley had bought their 15-year-old son a gun, didn’t lock it up and ignored blatant warning signs before he opened fire at Oxford High in Michigan, killing four students. In separate trials, each was found guilty and sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison, the maximum allowed.
“The set of facts seems so similar, and it’s so incredibly difficult to see it repeated,” said Karen McDonald, the Oakland County prosecutor who led the Michigan case. “My sincerest hope was that there would never be a need to charge parents in another school shooting. Securing a firearm takes less than 10 seconds. It would have been so easy to save the lives of four people.”
Between the Columbine High shooting in 1999 and the one at Apalachee 25 years later, children have committed at least 195 school shootings, according to a Post database that tracks gun violence on K-12 campuses. Among the cases in which the weapon’s source was identified by police, more than 80 percent were taken from the child’s home or those of relatives or friends. Yet just 11 times have the adult owners of the weapons been charged with any crime because they didn’t lock them up.
While cases against the adult gun owners have been rare over the past 25 years, the parents of all three mass school shooters under the age of 16 were convicted of a related crime. In 2015, the father of a 15-year-old shooter in Washington state was found guilty of illegally purchasing the gun that his son used to kill four people and wound a fifth.
The dearth of criminal consequences has often been blamed on weak firearms laws. Just 21 states and D.C. have passed statutes that impose criminal penalties on people who store guns where children could access them, according to the Giffords Law Center, an organization that advocates for gun-safety legislation.
For months, however, legal experts have conjectured that the precedent McDonald set could provide other prosecutors cover to pursue similar counts in similar cases. As in Georgia today, Michigan had not passed a law back then requiring gun owners to safely store their firearms away from children—a legal obstacle that didn’t prevent McDonald from holding the Crumbleys accountable.
But unlike the case in Michigan, prosecuted in a Democratic-leaning county just outside Detroit, Georgia’s Barrow County is staunchly conservative, making both the seriousness and speed of the charges against Colin Gray especially notable. In past cases, attorneys have often taken weeks or months to decide whether to pursue cases against the adult gun owners.
Prosecutors and law enforcement officials across the country who are struggling to grapple with gun violence will likely watch the Georgia prosecution closely to see how it plays out, legally and politically, in a state with loose firearms laws and a pro-gun culture.
