Colin Gray is the father of Colt Gray, who in 2014 at the age of 14 killed four people in a school shooting in Georgia. This case is the second one in which a teenage son committed murder at a school and a parent or parents have been convicted not just of negligence but of being guilty of either manslaughter or murder for failing to prevent the crime despite warning signs. It resembles its predecessor the Crumbley case in many respects.
I’ve written about the Crumbley case quite a few times; please see this. And I wrote about the Gray case before, too; see this post. I haven’t changed my mind, either. My position remains that although the parents could have been charged with negligence of some kind, manslaughter or murder should not have been charged.
Colt’s father Colin Gray was found guilty by a jury, however, and now has been sentenced to fifteen years (one of the charges was second-degree murder, defined in Georgia as “causing a child’s death through cruelty to children”). His son, Colt – despite having been 14 when the crime was committed, was nevertheless charged as an adult and has been sentenced to life without parole in a separate procedure before the same court. His having been charged as an adult doesn’t seem to have affected the jury’s decision on his father, however.
More:
[Judge] Primm’s sentence [of the father, Colin] was far closer to the defense’s request than the prosecution’s.
Prosecutors had asked the court to sentence Colin Gray to 80 years in prison.
“He is the reason four people are dead, seven were injured and countless others were traumatized, and he is the reason a 16-year-old boy was sentenced two days ago to the rest of his life in prison,” Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith said in court Thursday morning.
The father is the reason? Certainly, he is a contributing reason, but hardly the reason.
More:
Hobbs, the defense attorney, asked for a 20-year sentence, with 10 years served in prison and the rest on probation. Gray has already served just under two years in custody since his arrest a day after the shooting.
“Was it enough, what Colin did? Obviously not. The jury has said so and Colin accepts that,” Hobbs said. “But it was not nothing, and it was not indifference.” …
Ismael Angulo, whose brother Christian was killed, called the defendant a “complete failure of a father.”
“He made a choice to buy that rifle, he made a choice to ignore every red flag, and because of his choices, my little brother Christian and three others … are gone, and so many others will carry permanent scars for the rest of their lives,” he said.
Terry McElhannon, the grandfather of Taylor Jones, who was wounded in the attack, pointed an accusatory finger directly at Colin Gray while speaking.
“Why are we here today? It’s because of him,” he said, his arm extended. “His action and his neglect are responsible for what happened here. Though he did not shoot the gun, he bought the bullets.”
Victims and their families are very sympathetic and their stories are tragic. Of course they are extremely angry at Colin Gray and want him punished. But that doesn’t mean he is guilty of either murder or manslaughter, although a jury agreed that he was. The idea seems to be that it should be possible to prevent acts such as this if a parent is smart enough, aware enough, good enough, and has enough foresight to know that his son will kill. It’s a judgment call, and Colin Gray showed poor judgment.
More from the judge in Gray’s sentencing, explaining why he gave the number of years he did:
“Mr. Gray committed crimes, but his crimes are tethered to the crimes committed by his son, and that makes the situation a little unique,” Judge Nicholas Primm said in announcing the sentence.
“It matters that you didn’t have actual knowledge that Colt was going to school to do that. It matters that you didn’t intentionally commit a crime. It matters that you didn’t plan an attack. It matters that you didn’t seek to harm anyone. It matters that you didn’t pull a trigger,” he said.
There are actually some internal family issues here that I think were absolutely key in this man’s conviction, but should not have been:
In a two-week trial in February and March, Barrow County prosecutors argued the boy’s father acted with “criminal negligence” and was a proximate cause of the shooting. His defense team argued he was unaware of his son’s violent plans and had taken steps to get him help for his mental health struggles.
The state’s case included emotional testimony from students and teachers, police interviews with Colin Gray, photos showing unsecured firearms and ammunition in a bedroom closet, and testimony from the teen’s mother, grandmother and sister about Colt’s spiraling mental health.
It’s that last sentence I’m talking about. The father didn’t think the son was in so much trouble, and failed to properly secure the weapons. But the rest of the family differed, either back then and/or certainly now. What’s more, there’s no love lost between the two sides of the family:
Marcee Gray, the defendant’s estranged wife, testified their son had anxiety, was easily agitated and suffered panic attacks. She said it was “very obvious” he needed professional help, but her husband “just didn’t want to deal with it.”
Here’s what Colin Gray said:
The defense called just one witness: Colin Gray himself. He said he had scheduled counseling at school for Colt’s mental health issues and did not ever perceive his son as a threat.
“He’s a good kid,” the father said through tears. “He wasn’t perfect, nor was I, but to do something that heinous, I don’t know that anybody can see that kind of evil. The Colt I knew, the relationship I had, there was this whole other side of Colt I didn’t know existed.”
In a tense cross-examination, he acknowledged multiple firearms were stored in a closet, unsecured and unlocked, and he said Colt sometimes kept the rifle in his bedroom. He struggled to explain why Colt did not attend school for his entire eighth-grade year, according to school records. Colt attended Apalachee High School for only a few days before the attack.
I repeat that this sort of thing makes him negligent in leaving the firearms unlocked. But it’s easy to shrug off what a teen says, or teen angst, which is rather common. I believe the father when he says it never occurred to him that his son was capable of murder despite the warning signs. And I don’t think most parents of 14-year-olds can conceptualize their children as being capable of “that kind of evil.”
Colin Gray was certainly guilty of bad judgment:
Colin Gray also admitted he was aware that his son had been physically violent, had a photo of a school shooter on his bedroom wall and had texted a few weeks before the attack, “Whenever something happens, just know the blood is on your hands.”
But the police had interviewed Colt regarding a report of a previous threat, he denied making it, and the police were unable to prove anything.
But what of the mother’s contribution?:
Marcee Gray, the teen’s mother, was not charged in the case. She had lost custody of Colt because of her struggles with drugs and alcohol and did not possess the firearms, Smith said.
“We found what she did to be morally reprehensible. We do not believe she is a good mother, in my opinion,” he said. “But at the end of the day, she did not have custody of Colt, she did not have proximity to Colt, and she was not the one that provided him the firearms.”
Hey, why not charge her with murder anyway, for creating a disruptive family environment through her drug and alcohol abuse and her separation from the child, setting the scene for her son’s violent outburst and obvious anger control problems? I don’t really mean that seriously; but where does the finger-pointing stop?
Colin Gray’s attorney had argued that she bore some responsibility, too:
Brian Hobbs, one of his attorneys, argued his client should not be severely sentenced for his son’s crimes, and asked that he receive 10 years in prison.
“That is not lenience,” Hobbs said. “Ten years in a Georgia prison for a man who never intended to harm a single human being is among the most severe sentences ever imposed on a parent in American history for the act of the child.”
Hobbs also suggested that the teenager’s mother, Marcee Gray, bore more responsibility than his client for fostering his obsession with school shooters. Marcee Gray has not been charged in connection with the shooting.
“Fostering his obsession with school shooters?” Not sure what the evidence was for that, but it’s certainly of interest.
While we’re at it, how about charging the school, which was also negligent? Or the police who could not substantiate that the son made the threat? Here’s the part I’m referring to about the school’s negligence:
Colin Gray’s trial also revealed the shooting was nearly prevented. The morning of the shooting, school officials and resource officers went to intercept Colt after he made several concerning comments. But in a stranger-than-fiction mix-up, they confused him with another student named Kolton Gray.
Negligence on the part of the school?
I believe that one problem in this case is that Gerogia lacks a child access prevention law, so Colin Gray couldn’t be charged with violating one.
More about the actions of the school and of the family on the fateful day:
On the morning of the shooting, a call was made to Apalachee High School threatening to target five schools, of which Apalachee would be the first. The source of the threat was never determined.
During his first period class, Colt Gray asked his teacher how the school would respond to an active shooter. The teacher additionally noticed his backpack was “unusually heavy”. The teacher reported these concerns to administrators and other school staff via email. Gray’s second period algebra teacher, in whose class the shooting would later begin, was not informed about the email from his first period teacher.
At 9:42 a.m., Colt Gray texted his father Colin Gray, “I’m sorry, it’s not ur fault … ur not to blame for any of it. [sic]”. Upon receiving Colt’s texts, Colin called Colt’s maternal grandmother, who was with Colt’s mother at the time. Colt’s mother then attempted to reach Colt by phone and text message, but failed to do so.
Sometime after the second period algebra began at 9:45 a.m., Colt Gray left the classroom after requesting and obtaining a pass to see the school counselor. Around that same time, a different student in the class with the surname Gray and a similar first name also asked for permission to leave. Both Colt and the similarly-named student headed towards the same bathroom. …
At 9:50 a.m., Colt’s mother called the school, warning of an “extreme emergency”, and urged the school counselor to check in on her son. The school counselor told her that Colt had talked about a school shooting that morning.
School resource officers, alerted to Colt Gray’s comments during his first period class, began looking for him. They found the bathroom Colt was hiding in, but incorrectly escorted the similarly-named student to the front office instead. While Colt continued to hide in one of the bathroom stalls, school staff continued to search for him for twenty minutes.
Colt Gray allegedly exited the bathroom wearing yellow gloves, carrying a backpack and holding a white posterboard around his torso. A rolled-up poster, poster tube, or posterboard was used by Colt Gray that morning to conceal his rifle, which he carried in his backpack.
At 10:02 a.m., Colt Gray texted his mother, “I’m sorry”. At 10:18 am, she texted Colin Gray, suggesting he leave work and saying: “They’re going to need you at the school”.
The shooting followed.
[NOTE: This seems relevant, too:
Social-emotional learning and anti-bullying programs don’t reduce the risk of school violence, says a leading researcher. What’s remarkable, writes Hechinger’s Jill Barshay, is that Ron Avi Astor, a UCLA professor, spent years advocating for policies he now thinks are ineffective, and is willing to say so. “We were wrong,” he said at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
On the advice of Astor and others, schools have invested heavily “in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming,” Barshay writes. …
School shooters aren’t responding to bullying or trauma, Astor told Barshay. They crave notoriety. “Most of them are suicidal, and they decided to be homicidal so that they would be remembered,” he said.
Initially the story on the Columbine shooters was that the two teenage perps had been cruelly bullied in school, and that that was their motivation. That was not the case; their intent was to kill as many people as possible (many many hundreds), and there was also suicidal intent involved but it was very secondary. They actually had plans to get away, but killed themselves instead.]
