The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of a deadly school shooting in Georgia pleaded not guilty Thursday to the charges against him, including second-degree murder.
Colin Gray, 54, was not in court, but his lawyers told the judge during a brief hearing that their client pleads not guilty and waived formal arraignment. Arrest warrants said he caused the deaths of others by providing an assault-style firearm to his son “with knowledge that he was threat to himself and others.”
Gray and his son, Colt Gray, were both indicted in the Sept. 4 attack that killed two students and two teachers and injured others at Apalachee High School. Colt Gray, charged as an adult, has pleaded not guilty to 55 counts, including murder. Colin Gray faces 29 counts, including two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of involuntary manslaughter. Both are also charged with multiple counts of cruelty to children.
The shooting killed 14-year-old students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. Another teacher and eight other students were wounded, seven of them hit by gunfire.
Colt’s parents knew their son had a fascination with school shooters — with a shrine above his computer to the gunman in the 2018 Parkland, Fla., massacre — but they decided that it was in a joking context and not a serious issue, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent said at a court hearing last month.
Colin Gray’s indictment is the latest example of prosecutors holding parents responsible for their children’s actions in school shootings.
Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley, the first parents to be convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting, were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for not securing a firearm at home and acting indifferently to signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health before he killed four students in 2021.
Investigators have said Colt Gray carefully plotted the shooting at the 1,900-student high school northeast of Atlanta, drawing diagrams and listing potential body counts in a notebook.
They said he carried his semiautomatic rifle onto a school bus, with the barrel sticking out of his book bag, wrapped up in a poster board. He left his second-period class and emerged from a bathroom with the rifle, then started shooting people in a classroom and hallways, investigators say.