A father has been convicted in the US state of Georgia after his son shot dead two teachers and two fellow students at high school. The jury found the father partly responsible for the deadly violence against his son, because he had given him a semi-automatic rifle and then failed to pay attention to the increasingly unpredictable behavior of the fourteen-year-old boy, who took photos of other people. school shooters hung in his room. The judge has yet to impose a sentence.
In several American states, the public prosecutor’s office is now working on the co-responsibility of parents for the gun violence of their children. Nearly two years ago, the parents of a boy who shot and killed four schoolmates in Michigan were convicted. That was the first case in which the judge ruled on the negligence of parents. The father and mother were each sentenced to ten to fifteen years in prison. The son was sentenced to life in prison.
Similar criminal cases are now underway in other states. The father of a girl who fatally shot a teacher and a fellow student has been charged in Wisconsin. In Texas, a mother is accused of buying ammunition for her thirteen-year-old son. That boy was arrested before he could commit violence, on suspicion of planning a ‘terrorist attack’.
Christmas gift
In Georgia, Colin Gray (54) gave his son Colt the rifle, a SIGM400, as a Christmas present in 2023. On the witness stand, he stated that he saw that his son suffered from panic and anger attacks, but that he hoped that his new rifle would cause him to spend less time online or play video games. He had no idea, he said, that his son was plotting an attack on his school.
Colin Gray did not realize that his son had photos of Nikolas Cruz, the teenager who shot and killed seventeen people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. He told police he thought it was the photo of a member of the rock band Green Day.
There were also other signs of the mental pressure the boy was under. He told relatives he heard voices in his head and once asked his grandmother if she would still love him if he did something terrible. When the police rang the doorbell at the parental home on the day of the shooting, in September 2024, father Colin Gray said, before the police had said anything about the reason for their visit: “I knew it.”
Colt Gray has been charged with murder and is being tried as an adult, despite being fourteen when he committed his attack.
