The father of a teenage boy accused of killing four people in a shooting rampage at a high school in the US state of Georgia has been found guilty of murder, child cruelty and other charges.
Colin Gray, 55, pleaded not guilty to all 29 charges against him stemming from the 2024 attack that left two teachers and two students dead in Winder, Georgia.
His prosecution marks the third time that a US parent has been held criminally responsible for a mass shooting carried out by their child, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.
Prosecutors argued Gray was “the one person who could have prevented” the shooting by his 14-year-old son, because he knew he “was a bomb just waiting to go off”.
The attack at Apalachee High School outside the city of Atlanta claimed the lives of Christian Angulo, 14, Mason Schermerhorn, 14, Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53.
His son, Colt Gray, is currently awaiting trial for the shooting.
During the trial, the jury heard how Colin Gray had bought his son an AR-style rifle for Christmas the year before the attack, even though the boy had been questioned by police just seven months earlier about online threats to commit a school shooting.
Prosecutors argued he ignored numerous warning signs, including a notebook detailing how his son planned to kill students and teachers.
“After seeing sign after sign of his son’s deteriorating mental state, his violence, his school-shooter obsession, the defendant had sufficient warning that his son was a bomb just waiting to go off,” Barrow County Assistant District Attorney Patricia Brooks told jurors.
“And instead of disarming him, he gave him the detonator.”
His lawyers attempted to shift blame to his son.
“This is the person who went into the high school and shot and killed four people he didn’t even know and injured scores of others,” his lawyer, Jimmy Barry, told jurors, referring to the boy.
“This is the person who needs to be punished. He made a conscious decision to do this – a secretive decision.”-BBC
