The swift decision by prosecutors to charge the father of the 14-year-old suspect in the Georgia high school shooting will be another test of whether parents can be held criminally responsible for their children's actions.
The charges against Colin Gray came months after the parents of a Michigan school shooter were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter — the first parents in the U.S. to be convicted in their child’s mass shooting.
While details in the case against Gray, 54, remain limited, Georgia authorities arrested him Thursday on allegations that he had allowed his son to possess a weapon.
Gray made his first court appearance Friday morning, separately from his son, Colt Gray, 14, who had appeared earlier. The judge said the son faces four counts of felony murder in the deaths of two students and two teachers in a shooting spree Wednesday morning at Apalachee High School in Winder, where the suspect is a freshman. Nine others were wounded in the attack.
Colin Gray rocked back and forth in his chair and looked down during his appearance as the judge said he was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children in the second degree.
Brad Smith, the district attorney of the Piedmont Judicial Circuit, said later at a news conference that he was "not trying to send a message" in charging a parent of a child charged in a mass shooting for the first time in Georgia.
"I would hope that prosecutors would use every arsenal or every tool in their arsenal to hold people accountable for crimes that they commit," Smith said.
The teenage suspect, who was charged as an adult, was already known to law enforcement.
In May 2023, the father and son were interviewed by local authorities in connection with threats to carry out a school shooting, two law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News. But authorities did not arrest the teenager because they could not tie him to an online account that had made the threats, according to investigative documents.
The tip about the school shooting threat came to the FBI through a user of Discord, a chat platform popular with online video game enthusiasts. The FBI traced the supposed threat to an account registered to a person with the same name as Colin Gray.
But his son denied making any online threats, and ultimately, local authorities determined that the FBI tip was inconsistent with the information discovered during the investigation, according to the documents.
Colin Gray did share with investigators that he was teaching his son about "firearms and safety" and how to hunt, according to transcripts, while the child lived with him amid his separation from his wife.
If his son did make any threats, Gray told investigators that he "would be mad as hell and then all the guns will go away."
But at some point following the interaction with authorities, Gray bought his son an AR-15-style rifle as a gift, the law enforcement sources said.
There are shades of similarities with the case in Oxford, Michigan, where a 15-year-old committed a mass shooting at his high school in 2021.
His parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, were held partially to blame, with Oakland County prosecutors convincing juries at their separate trials this year that they had repeatedly ignored warning signs that a "reasonable person" would have recognized, including their son's deteriorating mental health and social isolation, and that they could have done more to prevent their son from gaining access to a weapon. The parents had purchased a semiautomatic handgun as an early Christmas gift.
The Crumbleys were ultimately sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.
But the charges against Gray are much harsher, and the judge on Friday said he faces a maximum total of 180 years in prison if found guilty on all charges.
Smith on Friday said the second-degree felony murder charge against Gray is geared toward "cruelty to children," and he was charged with two counts because of the two students who were killed.
The four counts of involuntary manslaughter are based on the four deceased victims, Smith said, and may hinge on whether someone exhibited "reckless conduct."
Georgia law prohibits the selling or furnishing of pistols and revolvers to minors under 18, although there may be limited exceptions for minors to handle firearms, such as during a hunting course, at a shooting range or on parental property with permission.
Smith declined to say if Gray had any gun locks or other mechanisms to secure his firearms inside the home.
J. Tom Morgan, a former prosecutor in DeKalb County, Georgia, who teaches criminology at Western Carolina University, said he would expect Gray's defense to seek to have the charges thrown out.
But while Georgia, unlike other states, has no law requiring "safe storage" of firearms to prevent children from gaining access, Morgan said parents still have an obligation to ensure that guns are not easily attainable, particularly when their child may have a propensity to want to commit violence.
"I grew up in a rural community in Georgia, where there is strong Second Amendment support," Morgan said, "but the people I know, the hunters are very responsible. If you're going to have a gun, you're going to have to have it responsibly."
Andrew Fleischman, a criminal defense lawyer in Georgia, said the case against Gray will come down, in part, to whether prosecutors can establish that he consciously disregarded the substantial and unjustifiable risk that other minors could suffer excessive physical or emotional pain.
"If dad bought his kid a gun knowing the kid had threatened to shoot classmates, he was consciously disregarding that risk," Fleischman said. "The risk is likely substantial because of the prior threats and the act is unjustifiable because there's no good reason to buy your teen" an AR-15-style rifle.
Michael Dezsi, a lawyer representing Jennifer Crumbley as she seeks to appeal her conviction, said the charges in Georgia are an example of shifting blame onto parents in the absence of states passing meaningful gun legislation.
As with the Crumbleys' son, who pleaded guilty as an adult and was sentenced to life in prison, it's "contradictory," Dezsi said, to charge shooters as adults but then also consider their parents responsible.
"It's a very slippery slope and sets a bad precedent that we're going to start charging parents for actions that are more akin to negligence that can be resolved in a civil manner," he said.
But Karen McDonald, the Michigan prosecutor who brought charges against the Crumbleys, said her case was not intended to be a precedent, and that it involved such a "rare, egregious set of facts" that she hoped it wouldn't happen again.
The prosecution's case in Georgia is a positive outcome, McDonald told NBC affiliate WDIV, if it "leads to people asking questions about where the gun was obtained."
Still, gun safety groups are expressing concern that another mass shooting may have occurred despite the high-profile trial in Michigan that gained national attention because parents of a mass shooter were convicted for the first time.
"That verdict should have sent a clear message to people like Mr. Gray," Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement. "But unfortunately for the victims and their families, he did not heed that message to prevent a tragedy."
