Father of Georgia school shooting suspect arrested on charges including second-degree murder

WINDER, Ga. (AP) — The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at a Georgia high school was arrested Thursday and faces charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for letting his son possess a weapon, authorities said. In April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley were the first convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting. 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, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference. “His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Hosey said. In Georgia, second-degree murder means that a person has caused the death of another person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. Father and son have been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, according to Hosey. Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with four counts of murder in the shootings Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta, Hosey said. The teen 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 obtained Thursday. Conflicting evidence on the post’s origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report said. “We did all we could do with what we had at the time.” When a sheriff’s investigator from neighboring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy had struggled with his parents’ separation and often got picked on at school. The teen 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. The teen was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Colt Gray, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the sheriff’s office incident report. The FBI’s tip pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to Colt Gray, the report said. But the boy said “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” according to the investigator’s report. The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a digital evidence trail indicating it had been accessed in different Georgia cities as well as Buffalo, New York. The attack was the latest among dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. Classes were canceled Thursday at the Georgia high school, though some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with heads bowed. The nine people — eight students and one teacher — who were taken to the hospital after the shooting were all expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said. Isaiah Hooks, an Apalachee High School football player, said he was in a nearby classroom when the shooting started. “It was rough, just hearing my peers and hearing the sounds, just knowing that people ended up getting hurt,” he said. “It was really hard to lose someone that pushed himself to really, like, make us better and make sure that we’re better at what we do,” Hooks said. “He pushed us to be great at what we did.” 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’s ever-expanding sprawl. At least 127 people have died in those killings, which are defined as events in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI. A month before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at the Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018, the bureau received a warning that he had been talking about committing a mass shooting. The sheriff’s report says investigator Daniel Miller spoke to the boy and his father May 21, 2023. “I mean they aren’t loaded, but they are down,” Gray’s father said, according to the interview transcript. He described a photo on his cellphone from a recent hunting trip with his son: “You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer.” Gray’s father called it “the greatest day ever.” ___ This story has been updated to correct the death toll at Sandy Hook Elementary to 26, not 20, and the spelling of Cristina Irimie’s first name, which authorities initially released as Christina. Associated Press journalists Charlotte Kramon, Sharon Johnson, Mike Stewart and Erik Verduzco in Winder; Trenton Daniel and Beatrice Dupuy in New York; Eric Tucker in Washington; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Kate Brumback in Atlanta; and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://apnews.com/c3c97267a4dfff64a59e1605e515c2f9