Georgia school shooter's father arrested, charged with second-degree murder

The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at a Georgia high school and wounding nine others was arrested and faces charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for allowing his son to possess a weapon, authorities said.

Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, was charged on Thursday with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference.

"These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a weapon," Hosey said. "His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon."

In Georgia, second-degree murder means that a person has caused the death of another person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. It is punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison, while malice murder and felony murder carry a minimum sentence of life. Involuntary manslaughter means that someone unintentionally causes the death of another person.

Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with murder in the shootings on Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta.

Arrest warrants obtained by the Associated Press accuse him of using a semiautomatic assault-style rifle in the attack, which killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine other people.

Shooter's origin

The teen denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when authorities interviewed him last year about a menacing post on social media, according to a sheriff's report obtained Thursday.

Conflicting evidence on the post's origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the report from May 2023 and found nothing that would have justified bringing charges at the time.

When a sheriff's investigator from neighbouring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy had struggled with his parents' separation and often got picked on at school. The teen frequently fired guns and hunted with his father, who photographed him with a deer's blood on his cheeks.

The teen was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Colt 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.

The FBI's tip pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to Colt Gray, the report said. But the boy said "he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner," according to the investigator's report.

The attack was the latest among dozens of school shootings across the US in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have set off fervent debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to active-shooter drills. But there has been little change to national gun laws.

According to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), there have been 385 shootings in the US so far in 2024.

According to the Washington DC-based organisation, which tracks gun violence in the North American country, the shootings resulted in the killing of 11,624 people.