Georgia tests a novel tactic in school shootings: Putting parents on trial

In a landmark criminal case in Michigan this year, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents convicted in connection with killings carried out by their child in a mass shooting.

Now, in the first mass school shooting in the United States since those convictions, Georgia officials appear poised to try the same tactic. On Thursday, prosecutors filed charges, including two counts of second-degree murder, against the father of the suspected gunman, saying he had provided a gun to his son “with knowledge that he was a threat to himself and others.”

Such charges were all but unheard of before the Michigan case, and the Georgia prosecution will test the emerging push to hold parents responsible for mass shootings by young people.

The bigger test may be whether the prospect of criminal prosecution spurs parents to do more to seek help for troubled children and to keep them away from guns in a country awash in firearms.

Proponents of such prosecutions have said that charging parents can help prevent young people from carrying out such shootings. But critics say it’s a misguided effort that scapegoats parents while lawmakers fail to act to reduce gun violence. And its effectiveness as a deterrent may be limited by the deep dysfunction at play in the families of some of the young people implicated in mass shootings.

The prosecution of the Crumbleys, after their 15-year-old son killed four people in 2021 at a high school outside Detroit, was seen as a long shot. But in separate trials, the Crumbleys were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and were sentenced to 10 years in prison.

"I’m not a big fan of finger-pointing, post tragedy, but we have an accountability problem in this country,” said Michele Gay, whose daughter, Josephine Grace, was killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. “This whole accountability discussion has been absent from the conversation for far, far too long.”

In the Georgia case, the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder on Wednesday left two students and two teachers dead. Hours later, a 14-year-old student was charged as an adult with four counts of felony murder. The next day, his father, Colin Gray, was arrested and charged with two counts of second degree murder, as well four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children.

Prosecutors tried the Crumbleys’ son as an adult while at the same time seeking to hold the parents responsible. Georgia prosecutors plan to do the same with the Grays.

As mass shootings have continued and the Supreme Court has expanded gun rights, some gun safety advocates have turned to the courts, pursuing civil cases against gun manufacturers and sellers and urging wider criminal charges in shootings like the ones in Georgia and Michigan.

“The facts of this case beg for criminal charges to be brought against Colin Gray,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety. “Prosecutors are waking up to the fact that these are actual crimes that need to be charged.”

Ekow N. Yankah, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Michigan, said the strategy falls short. “You’re not going to solve these problems by prosecuting parents one-off by one-off,” he said. “It just seems like an unlikely way to deal with what is fundamentally a gun saturation problem.”

In studies of school shootings conducted by the Secret Service, about three-quarters of the guns used were taken from the home of the perpetrator’s parents or a close relative. The prosecution of the Crumbleys centered on their purchase of a gun for their 15-year-old and what prosecutors portrayed as their failure to respond to signs of his mental distress.

Criminal cases against parents send an important message, said Nicole Hockley, whose son, Dylan, was killed at Sandy Hook. “It does set a precedent in terms of parental accountability — when a child is displaying signs to take them seriously, when you have firearms in the house to store them securely.”

But others said lawsuits, not criminal charges, are usually the appropriate way to hold parents accountable for their children’s misdeeds.

“Blaming the father — and the decision to immediately charge him — doesn’t get at the root problem of gun violence, which is that firearms are widely accessible to adults and children,” said Linda C Fentiman, a professor emerita at Pace University.

The prosecutions raise thorny questions about culpability.

“These cases are horrible, and I very much understand why a prosecutor would feel like parents like this were egregious in their lack of care,” Yankah said. “But I do think it’s worth pausing to realise that we have blown right by a deeply held principle: that you’re only responsible for your actions, and that when other people act, you’re not responsible for what they do.”

The case against the Crumbleys was bolstered by damning evidence about their son’s access to the weapon and his mental state before the shooting.

James Crumbley bought the gun that was used in that 2021 rampage as an early Christmas gift, despite clear signs of his son’s mental distress, and Jennifer Crumbley took the teenager to a shooting range a few days before the shooting.

The couple also met with their son, as well as with school officials, about two hours before the attack because he had sketched a gun, along with the words “help me,” on a math worksheet. But after the meeting with school officials, the boy remained in school.

The evidence was so pointed that some saw the case as an outlier rather than the beginning of a trend. But now it is providing a blueprint for Georgia.

At the time of the Michigan school shooting in 2021, the state did not require that firearms stored in the presence of minors be unloaded and locked up. (That changed last year.) Twenty-six states, including New York, California, Texas and Florida, have laws that require gun owners to lock up their firearms or that penalise them if children gain access to them, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that advocates tighter gun laws.

Suplina of Everytown said that such laws provide clearer guidelines and consequences for parents, but because Georgia does not have them, prosecutors are relying on manslaughter charges, as they did in Michigan. Under Georgia law, involuntary manslaughter occurs when a person “causes the death of another human being without any intention to do so,” through either an unlawful act or by committing “a lawful act in an unlawful manner.”

The two counts of second-degree murder are based on the two students who were killed; in Georgia, causing a death while committing cruelty to children can be charged as second-degree murder.

Investigators have not divulged the evidence that informed the charges against Gray or why they believe he knew that his son was a threat. In May 2023, a sheriff’s deputy interviewed him and his son after the FBI had received tips that posts on Discord, a social media site, included threats to shoot up a middle school.

Gray told the deputy that his son had access to guns that the family used for hunting. “I mean, there’s nothing loaded, but they are down,” he said, according to transcripts.

At the time, the son denied having posted the threats and told his father that he had deactivated his Discord account because it was too easy to hack, Gray said.

He also said that if his son had made the threats, “I’m going to be mad as hell, and then all the guns will go away.”

The deputy concluded that he could not determine whether the son was the author of the threats.

The following December, Gray gave the gun used in the shooting to his son for Christmas, according to three law enforcement officials.

Since the shooting at Apalachee High School, police have found evidence that the younger Gray was interested in mass shootings, particularly the 2018 massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation.

Gray and his son made brief court appearances on Friday morning and remained in custody. Their lawyers declined to comment.