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Colt Gray, 14.
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald became the first in the nation to charge parents in a school shooting. Jennifer and James Crumbley were charged after their son Ethan Crumbley, 15 at the time, murdered four students at Oxford High School in 2021 and wounded seven others.
Now, a prosecutor in Georgia is following suit, charging the father of a teen shooter in Wednesday's fatal shooting that killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine others at Apalachee High School outside of Atlanta, according to a social media post by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, was charged Thursday with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children.
His son, Colt Gray, 14, has been charged as an adult with four counts of felony murder. He used a semiautomatic assault-style rifle in the attack.
The Associated Press reported that the teen was interviewed last year by authorities after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Gray, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the sheriff’s office incident report, AP reports.
James and Jennifer Crumbley and son Ethan
But Gray denied posting that and said “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” according to the investigator’s report, AP reported.
CNN reports that the teen’s father told investigators at that time he had hunting rifles in the house and said, “Colt is allowed to use them when supervised but does not have unfettered access to them.”
Oakland County Prosecutor McDonald was quoted in the Washington Post Thursday as saying:
“The set of facts seems so similar and it’s so incredibly difficult to see it repeated. 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.”
In Oakland County earlier this year, parents James and Jennifer Crumbley were sentenced to 10–15 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter in connection with the deaths of four students at Oxford High School.
The parents bought the gun for their son for Christmas. Authorities charged that they ignored warning signs that their son was having serious mental health issues.
Ethan, now 18, was sentenced to life in prison without parole at the Oaks Correctional Facility in Manistee in northern Michigan.
