A few weeks into his freshman year, the authorities say, Colt Gray hid an AR-15-style rifle in his backpack and took it to his high school in Winder, Ga., where he opened fire, killing two students and two teachers.
His father, Colin Gray, is on trial this week, with prosecutors making the case in opening arguments on Monday that the son, now 16, is not solely responsible for the attack. The father was charged soon after the 2024 shooting with second-degree murder and cruelty to children, among other counts, as Georgia prosecutors pursued the increasingly common tactic of trying to hold parents accountable when their children are charged with carrying out a mass shooting.
Prosecutors have argued that the elder Mr. Gray is criminally culpable because he failed to head off his son’s descent into violence, even after “receiving sufficient warning that Colt Gray would harm and endanger the bodily safety of another,” according to an indictment. His son needed help, and had even asked for it, investigators said. Instead, the elder Mr. Gray gave him the powerful weapon used in the shooting as a Christmas gift.
He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The trial, which began a week ago with jury selection, will be a high-profile test of the push to punish parents, both through criminal charges and civil litigation. These efforts have fueled a larger debate over how and where to assign fault when teenagers commit mass violence.
Four people were killed and nine others were injured on Sept. 4, 2024, when the authorities say the younger Mr. Gray went on a rampage through Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., an exurb of Atlanta. It was the deadliest school shooting in Georgia history.
He was cornered by police officers and arrested, and now awaits trial on 55 charges, including counts of murder and aggravated assault.
A day after the shooting, the elder Mr. Gray was also arrested and charged. Chris Hosey, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, told reporters at the time that the charges were “directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon.”
After the shooting, relatives told investigators and the news media that Colt Gray had been flailing because of family turmoil. His parents had separated, and he and his family had been evicted from their home. His mother had repeated encounters with law enforcement, and had been ordered to stay away from drugs and alcohol.
Supporters of charging the parents of young mass shooting perpetrators say that it brings sorely needed accountability. Prominent cases have shown that the violence does not happen in a vacuum, and that before some shootings, parents and others did not act upon obvious red flags.
Yet some legal scholars and other critics are wary of the strategy, saying it uses parents as scapegoats, probably does little to deter future shootings and is a poor substitute for gun control legislation.
The approach gained momentum after prosecutors in Michigan brought criminal charges in 2021 against the parents of Ethan Crumbley, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison for killing four students and injuring seven people at his high school when he was 15. It was the first time in the United States that parents were held criminally responsible for a school shooting carried out by their child.
The parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, were convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter; prosecutors said they had failed to secure a gun in their home and had neglected to heed warning signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health.
After a 21-year-old man opened fire on a crowd at a Fourth of July parade outside Chicago in 2022, the gunman’s father pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts connected to helping his son attain a gun license and was sentenced to 60 days in jail.
The father, Robert Crimo Jr., helped his son, Robert Crimo III, then 19, obtain a gun license because he was too young to do so on his own. Prosecutors called it reckless because the elder Mr. Crimo was aware that his son had expressed suicidal thoughts and had exhibited other troubling behavior.
And last year, prosecutors in Wisconsin charged the father of a 15-year-old girl who killed a student and a teacher at her private Christian school before killing herself.
The father, Jeffrey Rupnow, had told investigators that his daughter had been having a difficult time after he and her mother divorced, and that he had bought guns as a way to bond with her. He had also given her the code to the gun safe.
In Georgia, investigators realized that the younger Mr. Gray had previously been on the radar of law enforcement for potentially threatening violence at a school the year before the shooting.
The sheriff’s office in Jackson County, Ga., dispatched deputies to visit the teenager and his father in 2023, after the F.B.I. received anonymous tips warning that a Discord user had threatened in a chat group to “shoot up a middle school,” according to investigators’ reports.
Investigators traced the posts back to an email address belonging to Colt, then 13. He denied posting the threat.
His father told investigators that he kept hunting rifles in the house, but that his son’s access was not “unfettered.” The elder Mr. Gray said that he would be “mad as hell” if his son had made the online threat, and that if it were the case, “then all the guns will go away,” according to a transcript of the conversation. He also said his son, then in middle school, had been tormented by bullies.
The deputies could not ultimately determine whether the teenager had made the threat.
After the attack, investigators discovered that he had developed an obsession with perpetrators of other school shootings, even creating a “shrine” to them. He had methodically devised plans to carry out one himself, they said.
Investigators found a notebook that he had left in class that day. He had sketched out the layout of classrooms and hallways, investigators said, and had written down estimates of how many people he believed he could kill or wound.
A note was also found at his home, apparently written to his family. “It’s not your fault,” it said.
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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