Father of Georgia suspect charged in deaths | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

WINDER, Ga. — The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of shooting four people and wounding nine others at a Georgia high school was arrested Thursday. He faces charges that include second-degree murder and manslaughter because his son was in possession of a gun, authorities said.

It is the latest example of prosecutors blaming parents for their children's actions in school shootings. In April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first to be convicted in a U.S. school massacre, sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for failing to secure a firearm at home and reacting indifferently to signs of their son's deteriorating mental health before he killed four students in 2021.

Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, has been charged with four counts of manslaughter, two counts of first-degree murder and eight counts of child abuse, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference.

“His charges are directly related to his son's actions and permission to possess a gun,” Hosey said.

In Georgia, second-degree murder means that a person caused the death of another person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. The punishment for this is 10 to 30 years in prison, while premeditated murder and deliberate murder carry a minimum of life imprisonment. Manslaughter means that someone unintentionally caused the death of another person.

Father and son have been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, Hosey said. Colt Gray's first court date is set for Friday, but no trial has been scheduled for his father. Neither Gray appears in online court records for Barrow County.

Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray with murder in Wednesday's shooting at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta. The arrest warrants accuse him of using a semi-automatic assault rifle in the attack that killed two students and two teachers. Nine other people were injured, seven of them by firearms.

A sheriff's report obtained Thursday shows the teenager denied threatening to carry out a school shooting last year when authorities questioned him about a threatening social media post.

Due to conflicting evidence about the origin of the post, investigators were unable to arrest anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and found nothing that would have warranted charges at the time.

“We didn't fail here at all,” Mangum told the Associated Press. “We did everything we could with what we had at the time.”

When a sheriff's investigator from neighboring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy had struggled with his parents' separation and was often bullied at school. The teenager frequently fired guns and went hunting with his father, who photographed him with deer blood on his cheeks.

“He knows how dangerous guns are, what they can do and how to use and not use them,” Colin Gray said, according to a transcript provided to the sheriff's office.

Colin told an investigator that he and his wife were divorced and evicted from their home. His wife took their two younger children, he said, and he and his son moved to a new house.

He also told an investigator that his son “had some problems at West Jackson Middle School, and now that he is attending Jefferson Middle School, things are much better.”

The teen was questioned after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Colt Gray, then 13, “may have 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 incident report.

According to the report, the FBI received several tips from users with internet addresses in Palmdale, California, Los Angeles and Cockburn, a city in Western Australia, including posts from a group chat on Discord.

The FBI's leads pointed to a Discord account linked to an email address associated with Colt Gray, the report said. But the boy said “he would never say something like that, not even in jest,” the investigator's report said.

The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because there were “inconsistent details” about the Discord account, although there was a digital trail that suggested it had been accessed in various cities in Georgia, as well as Buffalo, New York. The teen said he had stopped using the account several months earlier after it was hacked.

Investigators found that the Discord account's username was written in Russian. “The translation of the Russian letters gives the name Lanza,” the investigator wrote in his report, pointing out that this was the surname of the perpetrator of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 students and six teachers were killed.

In conversations with investigators, both Gray and his father, Colin Gray, said they do not speak Russian, and the boy denied he was the author of the threats. He said he previously had a Discord account but deleted it. He claimed he had been hacked repeatedly and was “afraid someone might use his information for nefarious purposes,” an investigator wrote.

The sheriff's report states that Investigator Daniel Miller spoke with the boy and his father on May 21, 2023. The father said his son had access to weapons in the house.

“I mean, they're not loaded, but they're down,” Gray's father said, according to the transcript of the interview.

He captioned a photo on his phone from a recent hunting trip with his son: “You can see him with blood on his cheeks because he shot his first deer.” Gray's father called it “the greatest day ever.”

A CAMPUS MOURNS

Classes were canceled at the Georgia high school on Thursday, but some people still came to lay flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with their heads bowed.

The nine people – eight students and one teacher – who were hospitalized after the shooting are expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.

Isaiah Hooks, a football player at Apalachee High School, said he was in a nearby classroom when the shooting started.

“It was hard to hear my colleagues and the noises and know that people ended up getting hurt,” he said.

He remembered Aspinwall, who was his team coach, as a tremendous motivator.

“It was really hard to lose someone who really pushed himself to make us better and make sure we were better at what we did,” Hooks said. “He pushed us to be great at what we do.”

Authorities did not provide a motive or explain how the suspect obtained the gun and brought it into the school, which has about 1,900 students.

According to a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in collaboration with Northeastern University, it was the 30th mass murder in the United States this year. At least 127 people died in these killings, which are defined as events in which four or more people die within 24 hours, not including the killer – the same definition used by the FBI.

Cases have already emerged where someone who was once on the FBI's radar but was not arrested later committed violent acts.

A month before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, the FBI received a warning that he had talked about committing mass murder. The FBI also followed up on a lead on the person later convicted of a fatal 2022 shooting at a gay club in Colorado.

This pattern underscores the challenges law enforcement faces in determining when worrisome behavior turns into a crime. Investigators sift through tens of thousands of tips each year to determine which ones might pose a serious threat. Cases like the Georgia school shooting raise new questions about whether more intensive investigative work could have prevented the violence.

Information for this article was contributed by Jeff Amy, Jeff Martin, Charlotte Kramon, Sharon Johnson, Mike Stewart, Erik Verduzco, Trenton Daniel, Beatrice Dupuy, Eric Tucker, Russ Bynum, Kate Brumback and Mark Thiessen of The Associated Press and Sean Keenan and Rick Rojas of The New York Times.

Students and parents leave the campus of Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, on Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Mark Gorman holds a candle during a candlelight vigil for the slain students and teachers at Apalachee High School, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024, in Winder, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A rescue helicopter is seen outside Apalachee High School after a shooting occurred Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024, in Winder, Georgia. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Brandy Rickaba and her daughter Emilie pray during a candlelight vigil for the slain students and teachers at Apalachee High School, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024, in Winder, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

People leave Apalachee High School on Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024, in Winder, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

This booking photo provided by the Barrow County, Georgia, Sheriff's Office shows Colt Gray, the 14-year-old suspect charged as an adult with murder in the Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. (Barrow County Sheriff's Office via AP)

Mourners pray during a candlelight vigil for the slain students and teachers at Apalachee High School, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024, in Winder, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

The rental home of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old suspect charged as an adult with murder in the Wednesday, Sept. 4, shooting at Apalachee High School, is seen Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024, in Winder, Ga. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Mourners pray during a candlelight vigil for the slain students and teachers at Apalachee High School, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024, in Winder, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)