A Georgia father was found guilty on Tuesday of ignoring warning signs and allowing his son unfettered access to an assault-style rifle that prosecutors say the teenager used in a deadly school shooting.
The jury deliberated only about two hours before concluding that the father, Colin Gray, 54, was guilty of more than two dozen charges, including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, stemming from the attack on Sept. 4, 2024, at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga. Two students and two teachers were killed.
Prosecutors said that the father had given his son, Colt Gray, the AR-15-style rifle as a Christmas gift, letting him keep it in his bedroom. The elder Mr. Gray did not take it away even as his son’s behavior became more volatile and he showed signs of an obsession with school shooters.
Colt Gray was 14 at the time of the shooting. He now faces 55 counts related to the attack, with prosecutors charging him as an adult. He pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
The prosecution of the elder Mr. Gray was the first in Georgia against a parent whose child was accused of a mass shooting. The trial was closely watched as an early test of the approach, which has gained traction across the country in recent years.
The first parents convicted in such a casewere those of Ethan Crumbley, a teenager sentenced to life in prison for fatally shooting four people at his Michigan high school in 2021. His father and mother were both found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.
On Tuesday, the elder Mr. Gray looked ahead blankly, pursing his lips as the verdict was read. Some in the courtroom quietly cried and held hands. If he receives the maximum penalty, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Brad Smith, the district attorney for Barrow County, Ga., who led the prosecution, said he hoped that the outcome could thwart violence by encouraging parents to act decisively if they see their child struggling.
“This was multiple warnings over a lengthy period of time,” Mr. Smith told reporters outside the county courthouse after the verdict was read. “You just had to do one thing, take that rifle away, and this would have been prevented.”
The two-week trial considered knotty questions about who beyond a gunman should be held accountable after a mass shooting.
Prosecutors sought to persuade jurors that the case was not as complicated as it might seem: They emphasized that the elder Mr. Gray gave his son the powerful rifle as a Christmas gift and that he did not take it away despite ample evidence of his son’s mental health problems.
But defense lawyers argued that it was unfair to say with the clarity of hindsight that the father should have been more cautious.
The elder Mr. Gray testified in his own defense, describing his struggles to connect with his son and help him as he struggled with panic attacks, intense anger and other behavioral issues. He had bought the gun to draw his son away from video games and the internet.
But he also said that despite his son’s emotional volatility, he had no reason to suspect that he was plotting a school shooting.
“There’s this whole other side of Colt I didn’t know existed,” he said.
Prosecutors showed jurors snippets of a text exchange between the father and his daughter after reports began to spread of a shooting at Apalachee High School, in which he asked if she had been in touch with her brother and she replied, “I think we’re thinking the same thing.”
When the police arrived at the family home, before officers could explain why they were there, Mr. Gray told them, “I knew it.”
Over two weeks of testimony, prosecutors tried to show that the son’s mounting struggles and capacity for violence were anything but hidden.
They painted a picture of a young man drowning in family chaos. His parents fought. His mother struggled with addiction. They moved constantly, forcing the younger Mr. Gray to switch schools repeatedly through elementary and middle school. Absences stacked up. He missed his eighth-grade year entirely.
By the time he enrolled at Apalachee High School for ninth grade, the boy was telling relatives about voices in his head. His grandmother testified that he had asked whether she would still love him if he did something terrible.
His parents discussed and researched possible psychological treatment, but never followed through. Instead, they gave him antidepressants prescribed to his mother, according to the prosecution.
In the years leading up to the attack, Colt Gray developed an obsession with gunmen in high-profile school shootings, particularly the teenager convicted of killing 17 people in Parkland, Fla., in 2018. He had photographs of the gunman and clippings of news coverage of the shooting on his wall. His father claimed to not recognize the person in the photos, at one point telling investigators he thought it might be a member of the rock band Green Day.
The shooting happened several weeks after the school year had began, but it was only the fifth day that the younger Mr. Gray attended classes. He brought the gun to school in his backpack, using poster board to cover the portion that poked out.
In his first period class, he asked his teacher if the school had done active shooter drills; she said there had been one the previous week. The question unnerved her, prosecutors said, prompting her to email a counselor and a vice principal.
During the next period, he asked to go to the counselor’s office but instead locked himself in a bathroom stall for 26 minutes. Around that time, his mother called the school, apparently alarmed by a text message.
But school officers were delayed in intervening because they confused Colt Gray with another student whose name was almost identical and looked for that student instead. Colt Gray emerged from the bathroom and opened fire in a classroom and hallway before he was cornered by school resource officers.
In a search of his home, investigators found detailed plans for the attack.
Lawyers for the elder Mr. Gray argued during the trial that he had not broken the law by having the rifle and ammunition in his home. Jimmy Berry, a defense lawyer, told jurors that prosecutors needed to prove that the elder Mr. Gray “knew that Colt would, not could,” carry out the shooting, and that he did not believe they had done so.
He acknowledged the horror of the attack, but said that one person bore responsibility and it was not the father. “This is the person who should be punished,” Mr. Berry said, holding up a booking photograph of Colt Gray.
Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon contributed reporting from Winder, Ga.
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
The post Man Who Gave His Teen a Rifle Is Guilty of Murder After School Shooting appeared first on New York Times.
