Warning to gun-owning parents as dad of school shooter faces life

Around half an hour before 14-year-old Colt Gray pulled out an AR-style rifle he’d gotten for Christmas and went on a rampage, killing four people at his Georgia high school in September 2024, he texted his father.

‘I’m sorry, it’s not ur fault… ur not to blame for any of it,’ he wrote.

Unfortunately for 55-year-old Colin Gray, earlier this year a jury profoundly disagreed with his son’s opinion and convicted the father on all 29 counts he faced over the tragic deaths of two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder.

Astonishingly, jurors took less than two hours to find him guilty of offenses including second-degree murder – making him the first parent to be convicted of murder in such a case. Last Friday his son pleaded guilty to 55 charges without a negotiated plea deal. He has now been sentenced to life without hope of parole.

On Thursday it will be his father’s fate which is weighed by a judge, as he too could spend the rest of his life in prison. Colin’s conviction marks a significant development in the controversial tactic for US prosecutors to go after not only school shooters, but their inadequate caregivers.

Around three-quarters of school shooters in recent years have acquired their guns at home. But in the US, any prosecution of citizens over their guns was always likely to be intensely scrutinized.

And yet there has so far been little pushback from the gun rights lobby as state attorneys have targeted particularly egregious examples of parents allowing their children – some of which have histories of mental illness or violence – to get a hold of the lethal weapons they have then turned on schools.

When, two years ago, James and Jennifer Crumbley were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten to 15 years for their role in the 2021 mᴀss shooting at Michigan’s Oxford High School in which their 15-year-old son Ethan Crumbley killed four other pupils, some legal experts predicted the landmark case wouldn’t be repeated.

Colt Gray killed four at his Georgia high school in September 2024

Jurors took less than two hours to find Gray Sr guilty of offenses including second-degree murder when he stood trial in February

The circumstances were too extreme, the parents’ behavior too reprehensible, they said. (School officials had shown the Crumbley parents their son’s violent drawings a few hours before the shooting, but they insisted he stay in school – despite having given him a gun days earlier).

Instead, the Crumbley case has spurred prosecutors across the US to follow suit, often with the blessing of local communities desperate to achieve some sort of accountability for horrific crimes – not just from unhinged children but from adults.

In Wisconsin, the father of 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow – who killed a teacher and fellow student in a school shooting last year – has been charged with allowing her access to the semi-automatic handguns she used in the attack.

Jeff Rupnow, 42, tried to connect with his daughter through guns when she struggled to cope with her parents’ divorce, said court papers. He told investigators she’d told him she wanted to kill herself and he’d had to lock up all the knives.

And yet, when he bought two pistols which they’d take out for target practice and saw her interest in guns had ‘snowballed,’ he still confided to her the code number for the safe, according to the prosecutors’ complaint, where he stored them in their shared home. Rupnow’s attorney filed a motion to dismiss charges, citing a ‘reckless disregard of the truth.’ He faces up to 18 years in prison if convicted.

Parents are being prosecuted even when their children haven’t carried out attacks. In Texas, mother Ashley Pardo has been charged with aiding in the commission of terrorism by buying ammunition and tactical gear for her 13-year-old son. Prosecutors say she bought the supplies ‘in exchange for babysitting his siblings.’ They also allege she knew he had expressed a desire to carry out ‘acts of mᴀss violence’ at a middle school.

Even before the Crumbleys were prosecuted, Robert Crimo Jr, the father of the 21-year-old Illinois gunman who killed seven people during a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, pled guilty in 2023 to misdemeanor reckless conduct for signing his son’s firearm application.

However, the prosecution of Colin Gray was unprecedented, legal experts told the Daily Mail, because he was convicted of second-degree murder, a far more serious offense (punishable by up to 30 years in prison) than the involuntary manslaughter charges for which the Crumbleys were found guilty.

According to Georgia’s criminal code, second-degree murder involves ‘the commission of cruelty to children.’ Consequently, Gray was only charged with the offense for the deaths of the two students, not the teachers.

Prosecutors didn’t argue that Colin Gray wanted the shooting to happen, but that he ‘failed to intervene, and his failure to intervene was negligent in ways that justify treating him as part of the homicide.’

James and Jennifer Crumbley were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten to 15 years for their role in the 2021 mᴀss shooting at Michigan’s Oxford High School in which their 15-year-old son, Ethan Crumbley, killed four other pupils

Natalie Rupnow killed a teacher and fellow student in a school shooting last year

Natalie’s father, Jeff Rupnow, has been charged with allowing her access to the semi-automatic handguns she used in the attack

Inevitably, it boiled down to his peculiar recklessness as the parent of a deeply troubled child. He didn’t just fail to stop his son from getting hold of a gun, he essentially put a particularly ᴅᴇᴀᴅly one in his hands.

Gray bought Colt the AR-style rifle for Christmas in 2023 and allowed him to keep the ᴅᴇᴀᴅly weapon unlocked in his bedroom. And he bought the gun just months after police had questioned the boy about online threats to commit a school shooting.

Gray, who owned various firearms, insisted in court that his son’s gun was meant for hunting and he taught him to handle it responsibly. ‘We didn’t have them in a safe but I’m telling you he had a healthy respect for weapons,’ he said. His lawyer said Gray was a loving if sometimes struggling parent who was ‘wired to see the best’ in his son.

Prosecutors countered that Gray, who lived with his son after becoming estranged from Colt’s mother, failed to get him help for anger and mental health issues. His wife, Marcee Gray, who, like Colin, suffered from drug addiction issues, testified that her husband ‘just didn’t want to deal’ with their son’s obvious problems.

The court heard he knew his son was obsessed with school shooters and had a ‘shrine’ in his bedroom to 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz who fatally sH๏τ 17 students and staff at Florida’s notorious Parkland High School shooting in 2018. Gray insisted he never noticed all the pictures of Cruz plastered on Colt’s walls. ‘There’s this whole other side of Colt I didn’t know existed,’ he said.

After the verdict, the lead prosecutor in the case said the outcome not only secured some justice for victims, but sent a powerful message to other parents about failing to act decisively when they saw their child’s spiraling mental decline. ‘We talk a lot about rights in our country but God gave us a duty to protect our children,’ said Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith.

However, the concept of holding parents to account with serious criminal offenses has divided legal experts and criminologists as to whether it is a step in the right direction.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more than 80 mᴀss school shootings at US schools since the 1999 Columbine mᴀssacre. Critics, including survivors and victims’ families, endlessly chorus that the world’s most gun-loving country never learns the lessons about preventing more tragedies.

Inevitably, these new prosecutions of parents aren’t appearing in a vacuum.

As the Supreme Court has refused to тιԍнтen gun controls, campaigners are turning to the courts by pursuing civil cases against firearms makers and sellers. They’re also pressuring state prosecutors to follow the example of Georgia and Michigan and focus on parents. Gun control advocates predict these prosecutions will be enormously valuable in encouraging owners to keep firearms out of children’s hands.

Criminologist and mᴀss shooting expert James Densley of Metro State University in St Paul said he wasn’t surprised prosecutors were starting to target parents in school shooter cases. He also wasn’t surprised that the gun lobby hasn’t complained, as he believes even the staunchest gun rights advocate accepts that owners should be responsible for keeping them out of the hands of children.

‘Prosecutors are looking for novel ways to address this problem. And in these prosecutions of parents, they found some leverage,’ he told the Daily Mail.

Inevitably, gun-owning parents may start feeling they are at risk of prosecution if they let their offspring anywhere near a firearm. But Densley stressed that the prosecutions weren’t simply about parents providing children with access to a weapon but ‘the context in which it is provided.’

‘If you’ve got a child who is not presenting as being in crisis, and you’re taking them for shooting lessons and spending time together at the firing range, that might be a perfectly normal thing to do and quite benign,’ he said.

By contrast, the ‘tipping point’ in the cases in which parents have so far been prosecuted, he said, was that they ignored ‘a lot of warning signs that this was a child on a difficult path and then giving them access to firearms.’

‘The parent knows about the mental health struggles, suicidal ideation, whether or not they’ve been referred to, you know, a counselor or mental health provider. They’ve got that history, and yet they’re still providing access to the firearm.’

His research into school shooters has revealed there was an important distinction between parents who were ‘oblivious’ to their children’s problems because they had their own personal issues, parents who consciously facilitated their offspring’s ‘pathway to violence’, and – third – parents who genuinely tried to do something for troubled offspring even if it wasn’t enough. He predicted that parents in that third category won’t be prosecuted as they’re unlikely to be found guilty.

Mark Chutkow, a criminal lawyer and former prosecutor in Michigan, told the Daily Mail the prosecutions of parents reflect the ‘frustration of local communities when these mᴀss shootings take place ‘they want to see someone held responsible.’

‘When it’s a child that was the trigger puller, they want to see adults also held responsible as well…especially when they’re teenagers like this, and they otherwise wouldn’t have legal access to guns without their parents.’

He said the Crumbley case was ‘followed very closely’ by lawyers and law enforcement, and when both parents were convicted, ‘that gave a road map to other prosecutors out there that this is something that could succeed.’

Chutkow admitted he was surprised that the jury convicted Colin Gray of second-degree murder, as it was a difficult offense to prove in such cases, given that it ordinarily requires proving the accused was aware a murder was going to occur. (Georgia officials say second-degree murder in their state specifically relates to harming children.)

Texas mother Ashley Pardo has been charged with aiding in the commission of terrorism by buying ammunition and tactical gear for her 13-year-old son

Robert Crimo Jr, the father of the 21-year-old Illinois gunman who killed seven people during a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, pled guilty in 2023 to misdemeanor reckless conduct for signing his son’s firearm application

Colin Gray is seen handcuffed and being escorted out after jury deliberations on March 3

The case against parents like the Crumbleys and Gray may seem obvious, but critics have cited fears of a ‘slippery slope’ in making parents responsible for their actions and prosecutors charging mothers and fathers whose criminal negligence is far less clear.

Some skeptics about charging parents also complain that, in these cases, prosecutors often have few options in what precise charges to bring. This could lead, they say, to parents facing offenses – such as manslaughter and second-degree murder – that are out of all proportion to what they did.

Another criticism is that blaming the parents lets other parties – such as the gun lobby and state governments – who might also play a part in facilitating school shootings off the hook.

Ekow Yankah, a law and philosophy professor at the University of Michigan, told the Daily Mail that ‘headline-grabbing prosecutions of terrible parents’ help ‘soothe’ public anger and allow Second Amendment advocates to fend off the тιԍнтer gun controls that – he insists – are the only real solution to school shootings.

Although he was ‘sympathetic’ to those who wanted to prosecute the extreme cases of parental misconduct, he was wary about the ethics of prosecuting parents for their children’s crimes.

‘Even the most loving parent at some point gets to say [to their child], ‘I have done what I can and you are now your own person, your actions are your own responsibility,’ he said.

He also worries that it will lead to parents being prosecuted for far less egregious behavior, saying: ‘Every time prosecutors are given a new legal tool, they will be empowered to stretch the boundaries of that tool.’

Others put their trust in juries to distinguish between responsible and irresponsible gun-owning parents.

Chutkow said jurors often put themselves in the accused’s shoes when deliberating and ask themselves how they’d have acted in the same situation. He’s confident they’ll be able to tell a parent who was sincerely attempting to do their best from one, like Colin Gray, who didn’t much care if they were adding fuel to the fire.