Friday, in back-to-back court hearings at the Barrow County courthouse, lawyers did not seek bail for Colin Gray or his son, Colt Gray, the 14-year-old suspect in a shooting at Apalachee High School, who was charged with four felony counts of murder, the AP reports. Both will stay in custody.
“It’s the latest example of prosecutors holding parents responsible for their children’s actions in school shootings,” wrote the AP, with a quote from Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey about the father’s role. “His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Hosey had said at a Thursday-evening news conference.
It's not uncommon for school shooters to have brought guns from home. In cases involving K-12 school shootings, more than 80% of individuals who engaged in shootings stole guns from family members, according to a 2022 NIJ summary of data from Northeastern University’s Violence Project, also known as the USA Today-Associated Press Mass Killings Database, which has gathered key details from mass shootings spanning from 1966 to present – and includes a School Shootings database devoted to that subset of mass shootings.
Colin Gray, 54, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children, for those injured, the Washington Post reports. The AP described the courtroom where Gray appeared on Friday in front of about 50 people, news media, and deputies: “Dressed in a gray-striped jail uniform, the shooter’s father answered questions in a barely audible croak, giving his age and saying he finished 11th grade, earning a high school equivalency diploma.”
In April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley were the first convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting. They were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for not securing a firearm at home and acting indifferently to signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health before he killed four students in 2021.
After Jennifer Crumbley’s guilty verdict on four counts of manslaughter, Tim Carey, law and policy advisor at the John Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said on a podcast that the conviction of parents marked a new path. “It’s shown a new avenue, a different sort of treatment towards school shootings and accountability that hasn’t yet been seen,” he said. But how far would it go, he asked. “Was this case a watershed moment for other parents to be held criminally liable for the actions of their children? It's unlikely, in large part because of just how extreme this particular case was. The parents gave their troubled child a firearm days before the shooting and ignored flagrant warning signs of violence that were clearly evident to the school to the point where they brought the parents in.”
In this case, it’s been reported that Colin Gray gave the military-style AR-15 gun to his son as a Christmas present.
That despite the fact that a year ago, in May 2023, local investigators interviewed Colin 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.
Even Colt’s close relatives seemed to agree that the young man needed help that he didn’t get. Before the announcement was made on Thursday, the teen’s maternal grandfather, Charles Polhamus, told The Washington Post that 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.”
The boy’s aunt, Annie Brown, told the Post that the teen had been “begging” the adults around him for mental health support in recent months. A sheriff’s report obtained by the AP concluded that conflicting evidence about the online post’s origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone. A few outlets, including CCN, painted a portrait of Colt Gray on Thursday showing a troubled child living within a chaotic household with easy access to guns.
Critics have long been asking for parents to be prosecuted. In the wake of a 2012 shooting in Ohio, Time magazine, in its Ideas section, noted the proportion of parents that left guns unlocked and asked: “How can we talk about school violence without any recognition of where the violence was conceived and nurtured? Shouldn’t parents who fail to secure a firearm at their home assume some responsibility for the actions of a child who uses the weapon?”
In 2016, calls for parental liability arose again as more information became known about the mental instability of Adam Lanza, even though he was 20 years old. “Despite knowing her son was severely mentally unstable, Nancy Lanza left her son home unsupervised with unfettered access to her arsenal of weapons while she went on vacation. This provided her son with the perfect opportunity to make a practice run to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he later used her firearms to shoot and kill kindergartners and first-graders,” wrote Professor Shaundra Lewis from Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law, who published, in a 2016 edition the Villanova Law Review, a paper entitled “The Cost of Raising a Killer.”
Comments