The father of the teenager accused of opening fire at a Georgia high school, killing four people and wounding nine, has been arrested on various charges including second-degree murder.
Colin Gray (54) the father of Colt Gray, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a social media post.
No other details were immediately provided, but a news conference was planned for later in the day.
In Georgia, second-degree murder means 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.
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Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with murder in the shootings at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta, Georgia.
Arrest warrants accuse him of using a semi-automatic assault-style rifle in the attack, which killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine other people.
The teenager 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.
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.
“We did not drop the ball at all on this,” Ms Mangum told the Associated Press in an interview. “We did all we could do with what we had at the time.”
When a sheriff’s investigator from neighbouring Jackson County interviewed the Colt Gray last year, his father said the boy had struggled with his parents’ separation and often got picked on at school. The teenager frequently fired guns and hunted with his father, who photographed him with a deer’s blood on his cheeks.
“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,” Colin Gray said according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff’s office.
Colt Gray is being held Thursday at a regional youth detention facility. His first court appearance was scheduled for Friday morning.
He has been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall (39) and Christina Irimie (53), according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey.
At least nine other people – eight students and one teacher at the school in Winder – were wounded and taken to hospitals. All are expected to survive.
Authorities have not offered any motive or explained how the suspect obtained the gun and got it into the school of roughly 1,900 students in a rapidly developing area on the edge of metro Atlanta. – AP