In a Georgia courtroom over the last two weeks, one relative after another testified about the turmoil surrounding Colt Gray in the years before he was charged with a deadly school shooting. His family had moved frequently, causing him to bounce between schools. His parents fought and his mother struggled with addiction. His grandmother recalled when he asked her, “If I do something terrible, would you still love me?”
Yet his father, Colin Gray, testified that he never considered the teenager capable of such a crime.
“There’s this whole other side of Colt I didn’t know existed,” the father said in court last week. “Could I have done better? Yes, I could have done more. I see that now.”
Now jurors will decide whether the elder Mr. Gray, 54, is guilty of charges including second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children. Two students and two teachers were killed in the shooting, which took place on Sept. 4, 2024, at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga. Colt Gray, 16, has pleaded not guilty and is still awaiting trial.
As prosecutors made their closing arguments on Monday, they sought to persuade jurors that Colin Gray should have realized the danger his son posed far sooner. Instead, they said, he had allowed him unfettered access to the powerful assault-style rifle used in the attack. The elder Mr. Gray had given it to his son as a Christmas gift and let him keep it in his room.
Because of all of this, prosecutors argued, the father should bear criminal responsibility for the shooting his son is charged with perpetrating. If convicted on all counts, the elder Mr. Gray could spend the rest of his life in prison.
“That man was the one man who could’ve prevented this mass shooting,” Patricia Brooks, one of the prosecutors, said during the closing arguments. “He was the one man who ensured that Colt Gray had the tools he needed to commit mass murder.”
The case has been closely watched as a test of an emerging strategy employed by prosecutors across the country to charge parents after their child is accused of carrying out a mass shooting.
The first parents convicted in such a casewere those of Ethan Crumbley, a teenager who pleaded guilty to fatally shooting four people at his Michigan high school in 2021; his father and mother were both sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.
But in court on Monday, Jimmy Berry, a lawyer for the elder Mr. Gray, argued that fault in the Georgia case ultimately lay with one person, holding up the booking photo of the son.
“This is the person who went into the high school and shot and killed four people,” Mr. Berry said of the younger Mr. Gray. “This is the person who needs to be punished. He made a conscious decision.”
The son, now 16, faces 55 charges, including counts of murder and aggravated assault. .
The father was arrested and charged a day after the attack. Prosecutors said it quickly became evident that the father’s actions — and his inaction — had meant his son had access to weapons and ammunition while his mental health problems were not adequately treated.
When reports of the shooting began to spread in Winder, a far-flung suburb of Atlanta, Mr. Gray texted with his daughter, then in middle school, asking if she had heard from her older brother, according to testimony and excerpts from their exchanges shown to jurors. She wrote back, “I think we’re thinking the same thing.”
He rushed home and went straight to the laundry room that served as his son’s bedroom. The AR-15-style rifle, he testified, was not there.
Investigators testified that they found ammunition left around the house, and plans outlining the attack in the son’s bedroom. On one wall was what prosecutors described as a “shrine” to the gunman who killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in 2018, including photographs and news clippings.
Over 10 days of testimony, a series of witnesses — including Colt Gray’s mother, grandmother and sister — portrayed a family gripped by chaos and a boy who was flailing.
He changed schools repeatedly, enrolling in seven schools in four years. He caught the attention of school officials after he used a school-issued computer to search for “how to kill your dad” online. Absences stacked up. He missed eighth grade entirely.
He told his grandmother about voices he heard in his head and his parents’ attempts to treat his condition by giving him an antidepressant that had been prescribed to his mother.
By ninth grade, Colt Gray lived with his two siblings and his father, who had sole custody after their mother, Marcee Gray, failed a drug test.
Prosecutors argued that the elder Mr. Gray failed to follow through with getting mental health care for his son — and to keep the gun locked away.
Defense lawyers argued that he was a single father who was ill-equipped to handle his son’s needs.
In his testimony, Mr. Gray said he had bought the gun for his son as a way to connect with him, to strengthen their relationship and to pull him away from video games and the internet. He said that despite all his son’s struggles, he did not believe that the teenager would resort to that kind of violence.
He choked up on the witness stand. “I struggle with it every day,” he said.
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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