Winder, Georgia. The father of the teenager accused of opening fire at a Georgia high school, killing four people and wounding nine, has been arrested on multiple charges, including second-degree murder, authorities said Thursday.
Colin Gray, 54, father of Colt Gray, has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) said in a social media post.
“These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a gun,” GBI Director Chris Hosey said at an evening news conference. “His charges are directly related to his son’s actions, and allowing him to possess a gun.”
In Georgia, a second-degree murder charge means that the person has caused the death of another person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. It carries a prison sentence of 10 to 30 years, while felony murder and criminal murder carry a minimum sentence of life in prison.
Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with murder in Wednesday’s shooting at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta. Arrest warrants obtained by The Associated Press accuse him of using a semiautomatic assault rifle in the attack, which killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine others.
The teen denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when authorities interviewed him last year regarding a threatening social media post, according to a police department report obtained Thursday.
Conflicting evidence about the post’s origin prevented investigators from arresting anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and found nothing that would have warranted filing charges at that time.
“We didn’t make a mistake on this at all,” Mangum told the AP in an interview. “We did everything we could do with what we had at the time.”
When an investigator with the sheriff’s department in neighboring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy had been shaken by his parents’ separation and was frequently bullied at school. The teen frequently shot guns and hunted with his father, who took a photo of him with deer blood on his cheeks.
“He knows the severity of guns and what they can do, and how to use them and how not to use them,” Colin Gray said, according to a transcript obtained from the police department.
The teen was interviewed after the police department received a tip from the FBI that Colt Gray, then 13, “had possibly threatened to carry out a shooting at a high school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the police department’s report.
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– 2024-09-08 04:53:36
