Apalachee Killer’s Father Now Charged
Colin Gray mug shot. Barrow County Sheriff’s Office
The father of the minor charged with 4 murders and wounding of 9 others at Apalachee High School in Georgia has now been charged himself.
Georgia officials charged the father of the suspected Apalachee High gunman with two counts of second-degree murder Thursday — the most severe ever filed against the parent of an alleged school shooter. The arrest came less than 36 hours after two students and a pair of teachers were gunned down with an AR-15-style rifle that, investigators allege, the man allowed his 14-year-old son to possess.
Along with murder, Colin Gray, 54, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children. His son, Colt Gray, has been charged with four felony counts of murder.
The father “knowingly allowed him to possess the weapon. His charges are directly connected to the actions of his son,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at an evening news conference where he provided no other details on what led to the charging decision — or its remarkable speed.
The father of the 14-year-old student accused of opening fire at Apalachee High School in Georgia was arrested and charged with second-degree murder Sept. 5. (Video: Reuters)
There were warning signs before Wednesday’s attack, according to law enforcement officials and family members.A year ago, local investigators interviewed Gray and his son about alleged online threats the teen had made to shoot up a school, accusations that Colt Gray denied at the time. This week, the boy’s aunt, Annie Brown, told The Washington Post that the teen had been “begging” the adults around him for mental health support in recent months.
Before Thursday’s announcement, the teen’s grandfather, Charles Polhamus, said he wanted Colin Gray charged along with his son.
“If he didn’t have a damn gun,” Polhamus said, “he wouldn’t have gone and killed anybody.”
Though Colin Gray is in custody, his case had not been added to the online county court system by late Thursday evening, so it remains unclear who will represent him.
The charges come just months after a mother and father in Michigan became the first parents of a school shooter ever convicted of involuntary manslaughter, a less severe crime than second-degree murder. Investigators found that, in November 2021, James and Jennifer Crumbley had bought their 15-year-old son a gun, didn’t lock it up and ignored blatant warning signs before he opened fire at Oxford High in Michigan, killing four students. In separate trials, each was found guilty and sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison, the maximum allowed.
It enrages me – as a father, a gun owner, and a southerner – that guns are so fetishized and mental health so stigmatized that parents can’t see a need to take away access to firearms when a kids is in crisis.
It also enrages me that no change will come from this since too many American stigmatize mental health care and fetishize guns.Report
If his parents had different attitudes towards mental health or firearms we wouldn’t be hearing about this. However that says nothing about society in general nor does it say anything about trends.
When we select for school shooters we’re also selecting for a large number of things going wrong. Part of that is going to be bad parenting.
Locally my strong impression is it’s much easier to get mental health treatment.Report
You aren’t from the south are you?Report
Mental health intervention is all well and good but it seems to me that the biggest issue is the police apparently not responding to multiple warnings.Report
Allegedly they went out a year or so ago, questioned the kid and his dad, believed them and moved on. I doubt a small department like that is monitoring Discord for the rantings of semi-anonymous teenager.Report
Possible. The police locally thwarted a ‘would be school shooter’ under similar circumstances in the spring, the key differences being that the police took the tips about threats and disturbing stories seriously and the kid’s father properly securing his firearm so it never became accessible. There had been significant mental health interventions, which seems to be all anyone talks about around here with students of the local schools, but it doesn’t seem to have dampened the inclination.
Anyway I think the unfortunate reality may be that the police need to be a lot less willing to believe people once someone has threatened to do something like this. That or have some other authority that can compel treatment and enforce monitoring.Report
We also need to get over the idea that you can buy firearms without demonstrating both competence/training AND proper storage. My kids can’t access either our ammunition or the firearms we own without me giving it to them. That should be a legally enforceable norm as well.Report
It ought to be a homeowner’s insurance thing.Report
I’m not sure that the risks we are talking about are really insurable, given that they amount to commission of crimes. My firearms are listed on my home owners but that just means I could file a claim for reimbursement if they were destroyed in a fire or something, similar to how you can insure jewelry.Report
I’m nowhere near an expert on insurance, but it seems to me that having a known, unremediated hazard, like an unsecured firearm, in your house might make it uninsurable.Report
Disparate impact, my man. Disparate impact.Report
I’m not sure how that applies.Report
I think what you’d want to have happen is for Georgia to pass a firearm storage law. They toyed with that idea but didn’t do it.
Washington has it: https://www.washingtongunlaw.com/safe-firearm-storage
If we’re talking about insurance, then school shooting is so rare it basically rounds to zero. Don’t expect insurance for it to be big because multiplying something by near zero won’t result in a big number.
That’s over and above the issue that insurance won’t cover crimes which is what we’re talking about here.Report
There are a lot more bad things that can happen with an unsecured firearm. I agree that school massacres are a vanishingly small percentage of these.Report
Depending on the facts I don’t see why you couldn’t be sued (at least in jurisdictions I am familiar with which do not include Georgia) , particularly in situations like this where the firearm was apparently gifted to a minor.Report
Philip: We also need to get over the idea that you can buy firearms without demonstrating both competence/training AND proper storage.
Since it’s a core constitutional right, I’d think it’s on the gov to prove incompetence. Which a lot of states do with “red flag” laws. That also raises the bar for “incompetence” to “likely to kill themselves or others”.
Here we have parents either ignoring red flags or actively enabling him to the point of committing crimes despite them.
I’m not sure what we do other than arrest them after the fact. For all your suggestions on how they should behave, if they were willing to do that then we wouldn’t be talking about this one.Report
The personal use of a firearm was never a core Constitutional right, until the Heller decision said that it was.Report
Are there any other core Constitutional rights you’d like to claim aren’t individual rights?
Maybe religious freedom means the state can have a church and ban all others? Or maybe freedom of speech means the state is allowed to have an official news source and ban individual speech if we disagree?
Any examples at all of “rights” that really mean “the state can do it and prevent individuals?”Report
You can’t ask a left-winger a general question about boots and faces. You need to specify who gets to be the boot, and who has to be the face.Report
“Stomping up”Report
Orwell was a left winger. Relevant to this topic I believe he also said:
The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do, they cannot give the factory worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see it stays there.Report
I love it when people, even Orwell, appeal to the “overthrowing tyranny” argument to support personal gun ownership.
Lets get real.
OK, so Mr. “I have a gun and will use it to resist tyranny”, who, exactly, are you planning to kill, and what justifies your killing?
Like, isn’t the very first people the tyrant will send to your door be the local police?
So are you prepared to tell everyone that the gun hanging on the wall is really intended to kill cops?
And is the gun meant to be under the control of a group to which you owe allegiance, or are you suggesting that just anyone should be encouraged to go out and be a law unto themselves?
Do you think the people why broke the windows in my neighborhood in May 2020 were the people Orwell had in mind?
Was he thinking about the Jan 6 insurrectionists?
Is there like some metric or sorting mechanism that tells us “Its OK to kill THIS cop, but definitely not THAT one”?
The “Overthrowing tyranny” argument is always bullsh!t, a gauzy Hollywood Hunger Games cosplay.
People conveniently forget that a tyrant, any tyrant, will be wildly popular and likely supported enthusiastically by your neighbor, the guy who stockpiles guns.
Using a gun to resist tyranny really means killing your neighbor, and then killing the cops who are called to the scene.Report
I don’t think that’s quite the argument being made.Report
You aren’t arguing with me, you’re arguing with 200 years of Constitutional law and jurisprudence.
The Heller decision was just an opinion, like Roe or Chevron, subject to being overruled by those with different opinions.
It may be a good or bad opinion, but appealing to it as if it is somehow a unassailable principle is just wrong.
If you want to make an argument that America pre-Heller was some dystopian hellscape, you have your work cut out for you.Report
Is America a dystopian hellscape post-Heller?
I’m trying to get my dystopian hellscape calibrations.Report
So that’s a “no” then? You don’t have any examples of Constitutional Rights that aren’t Individual Rights?
Chip: 200 years of Constitutional law and jurisprudence.
Not really. The previous case was Miller, decided in 1939. Miller (a bank robber) was either dead or on the run when the case was argued and he didn’t present a counter argument to the government. Further both sides of the debate liked to point to Miller.
Far as I can tell, Miller was confused to the point where Heller didn’t overrule Miller.
Amazingly, gun rights managed to mostly not end up in front of the Supremes over the last 200 years. No one asked them if the 2ndAM was an individual right before Heller.
The implication is both sides didn’t want to hear the answer.Report
Not sure if South Florida counts as “south”.
As for mental health in South Florida, I’m going through that for one of my kids and I’ve been reasonably pleased with the tools, process, and outcome.Report
I think the consensus view is that south Florida is the north and north Florida is the south.Report
I think the Atlantic coast of Florida is becoming more northern, even up north. Now, the Florida panhandle, or anywhere north of Orlando away from the coast, you’re in Dukes of Hazzard country.Report
much of South Florida is northern transplants.Report
Having spent a fair amount of time in northern Florida, and some time in central Florida, increasingly, all of Florida is becoming the North. It feels a bit like a country being colonized; the locals are still there, and still very Florida, but there’s a huge influx of people from the North, especially the Northeast, all up and down the Atlantic coast and parts of the Gulf Coast. Before long, the Panhandle will be the only Southern part of Florida.Report
Agree 100%.Report
Charging the parent/s of a child who goes off and does something like this is probably a good play, but I wonder if there’s going to a limiting principle for it somewhere.Report
I think a pretty critical fact in both MI and this is the parents actually buying the weapon. It blows my mind that someone would do that.Report
I recognize that legal use of words like ‘Involuntary Manslaughter’ have special meanings and not plain meaning… but shouldn’t the ‘limiting’ factor be something like an accessory and/or aiding/abetting?
Seems you could make incremental gains on secure storage of arms with minors in the house if you reliably convicted people of aiding and negligence crimes rather than going all-in on Murder charges. Taking their house with fines and exposing adults to civil liability for negligence is probably a step might gain traction.Report
I don’t know the deal in other states, but the general rule in Maryland is that being a party to the crime opens you up to being charged with the same crime as the principal. As you would expect this has been controversial at times but that is how it works today. Facts may result in greater leniency in sentencing but it isn’t changing the potential jeopardy.
It would certainly be possible for a legislature to pass a criminal statute aimed specifically at this kind of conduct.
In terms of civil liability I don’t see why you couldn’t get there now for these types of facts, at least in jurisdictions I am familiar with.Report
There once was a time when something like this was considered so shocking it would be national news for says, weeks and inspire a dozen magazine stories and books.
This will disappear from everyone’s consciousness within a few days.
No, this isn’t the natural or unavoidable state of affairs anywhere in the civilized world.
Rather, it is a state of affairs preferred by a zealous and committed minority of American voters.Report
It being national news for days is why we have the issue now. These shooters do it for fame. Giving them fame is rewarding what should be punished.Report
I’ve also become convinced thats a major driver. One of the best things you can do is not click on the news stories or circulate stories and/or takes on social media.Report
People like this disturbed young man, or the other young man in that other horrible shooting, or the other guy who did that OTHER spree shooting, and that crazed guy who did the OTHER OTHER horrible shooting, no not that one but the one before, exist everywhere in all nations and corners of the world and have since the beginning of time.
Yet only in America, and only in the past few decades has this sort of thing become so routine that we can’t even remember them, and don’t bother to try because another one just like it will be along presently to make us forget all about this one, and the grieving parents and traumatized children who will be quickly forgotten, and our rote thots&prars will disappear like last cotton candy in a rainstorm.
Only. In. America.
And only because we, no, that’s not right, the collective “We” did not choose this but a determined minority who instantly rise up and scream every time someone mentions controlling the weapons of destruction.Report
This is wishful thinking. Your conclusion is “other people” need to change their lifestyles but “you” do not.
Other countries are awash in guns but absent the media focus they don’t have this problem.
For that matter the United States before Columbine had the same culture we do now but we didn’t have this problem. The media made Derik and Eric household names. These are his followers.
Turning losers into major celebrities invites other losers to copy that success.Report
Why do you think media in other countries are any different than here?
The biggest media outlet here in America is owned by the very same person who owns the biggest media outlets in the UK and Australia, and they cover crime and disorder exactly as they do here.Report
I don’t understand how the media works in other countries. Nor do I understand how someone becomes famous for committing heinous deeds.
It is possible that scale matters. It is possible that they don’t celebrate their killers for other societal reasons.
However I can say there are lots of ways to commit mass murder that don’t involve firearms but they haven’t become copycat themes here or there. (No examples please)
We’re dealing with people who plan for months or even years. If they had a different blueprint to copy and obsess over the overall body count could easily be a lot worse. Derik and Eric had no budget.Report
Do some googling on the last Australian spree shooting and its repercussions.Report
Sure, that’s a great example.
One of their big conclusions was… : saturation media coverage provides both instruction and perverse incentives for dysfunctional individuals to imitate previous crimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australia)#Mental_illness_and_copycat_effects
Following the Port Arthur Massacre the gov went seriously into “take everyone’s guns”. In a population of 24 million with overwhelming support from the population they picked up 640k guns.
That means they were already disarmed by our standards since they had one gun for every 37 people while we have more than one gun per person.
So all you have to do to make this approach successful is to get everyone to be eager to give up their guns to the point where we almost don’t have any in the US, then you can pass a law like this to clean up what’s left.
Then you’d better hope really hard that rampage killers don’t start using other methods that are more effective than guns at doing this sort of thing.Report
So all you have to do to make this approach successful is to get everyone to be eager to give up their guns to the point where we almost don’t have any in the US.
I agree.
I know this sounds like a fantasy but look at the sweeping changes in public attitudes just since you were born.
And honestly, our biggest allies in this are the gun nuts and the NRA.
When I was a kid, the image of the “typical gun owner” was kindly uncle Ted who went deer hunting once a year.
Today the image of the “typical gun owner” is a crazed nutter who mumbles about Jade Helm and Agenda 21 while he cleans his Bushmaster, or the guy who says “Yes, my gun rights are more important than your kid’s life.”Report
Today the image of the “typical gun owner” is a crazed nutter…
That’s the Left’s point of view. Others would disagree.
Chip: guy who says “Yes, my gun rights are more important than your kid’s life.”
My zip code’s murder rate holds steady at zero. You’re asking the law abiding to give up their rights so you can virtue signal convince criminals into following the law.
It would be a lot easier, faster, and more practical to deal directly either with the criminals who do this sort of thing or the media’s efforts to encourage it.Report
It’s worth noting that the homicide rate was higher when this kind of thing was considered so shocking that it would have been national news for days.
In fact, the homicide rate continued falling for 16 years after the Columbine shooting, and didn’t start rising again until 2015, when we decided that keeping violent criminals off the streets was less important than having prisons that look like America.Report
“ In fact, the homicide rate continued falling for 16 years after the Columbine shooting, and didn’t start rising again until 2015, when…..
…. Donald Trump descended the golden escalator; or was it when…..
…. Confederate symbols were banned after the Charleston massacre ; or was it when…..
…. The Supreme Court issued their Obergefell decision ; or was it when…..
…. the Nucler Deal with Iran was signed ; or was it when…..
…. A married couple massacred 14 in a party in San Bernardino ; or was it when…..
…. Pope Francis visited America ; or was it when…..
….. Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender?
I mean, there are so many reasons I can think of that can really make someone murder others. Me, I think it was the escalator thing.
By the way, I missed the Make Prisons like America Again Act of 2015. Do you mind sending a link to it?Report
So, you’re saying that America today is much more peaceful and law abiding than in recent decades, and in fact is is not in a doom loop of chaos and dysfunction?
Huh.
Boy do I stand corrected.Report
Depends on your zip code.Report
Not if you are TFG. He seems quite convinced we are descending into chaos. Sort of his brand actually. And he get 74 million votes with that brand last time.Report
Are we no longer a dystopian hellscape post-Heller?
It’s hard to figure out what the argument actually is, sometimes.Report
You need to find the guy saying we are in a doom loop of crime and chaos.
Start by searching the comments here at OT.Report
I don’t recall anyone saying that about the United States.
I only find examples of newspapers talking about how this or that city is falling into one. Like The New York Times, say.
But just because this or that city is in a doom loop doesn’t mean that the country is in a dystopian hellscape. It’d be a mistake to interpret “the local government in the city there is very bad” as making a statement about the rest of the country.
Was that the interpretation that you were using?
It’s hard to figure out what the argument actually is, sometimes.Report
I think Brandon was referring to FBI statistics rather than newspaper headlines.
And I gotta say, he has a pretty good case.Report
So, taking the FBI’s numbers at face value, Heller didn’t have a huge impact?
Fair enough.Report
“You need to find the guy saying we are in a doom loop of crime and chaos.”
well, there’s this guy for startersReport
Its now been scarcely more than a week, and this story has vanished from the public consciousness and is already largely forgotten.
Spree shootings are something to be managed and accommodated, not solved.Report