The Georgia school shooter’s father has been arrested and charged with homicide
The case seems similar to the Crumbley case in Michigan. I’ve written six previous posts about the Crumbley case, because it alarmed me and I thought the parents either should not have been charged or were way overcharged. From this previous post on the Crumbleys:
No, of course it won’t be “run of the mill parents” who are charged. But in these school shooter situations, there are often warning signs that go unheeded, or that are not dealt with properly. Hindsight is 20/20, and as I said before, these particular parents don’t seem to have exercised good judgment. But they are not guilty of any crime. And finding them guilty of a crime opens the door to the state using the precedent and the tool as it sees fit, in particular to punish parents who might espouse positions it doesn’t like.
From the Georgia case:
Authorities charged Colin Gray, the father of the Georgia school shooter Colt Gray, with four counts of manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children.
Colt is accused of killing two teachers and two students. He faces four counts of felony murder.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) Director Chris Hosey didn’t confirm Gray gifted the gun to his 14-year-old son.
Hosey said Gray “knowingly allowed” his son “to possess it.”
According to reports, Gray gave Colt the gun for Christmas only a few months after the FBI interviewed the family about online shooting threats.
The FBI didn’t seem unduly alarmed, nor did the school system. Of course, more might emerge in time about the parents’ negligence – it’s very very early yet and I’m sure I don’t have all the facts. But whatever emerges I doubt it rises to the level of homicide charges to the parents. The murders are absolutely horrible, of course. But wouldn’t the FBI and the school system be at least as culpable as the parents? And if the 14-year-old son is being tried as an adult (which he is), why are the parents considered responsible for murder instead of some sort of negligence? Unless the father put the gun in the boy’s hands and told him it would be a great idea to go to school and kill someone, I just don’t see that murder is an appropriate charge.
(Was going to post this in Open thread, but looks like neo is early today…)
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The Rule of Law gets more outta hand every day…
Georgia school shooter Colt Gray and his father Colin in court – as family’s dark past is revealed
Guess with Colin Gray facing some 180-years in prison for his son’s (Colt Gray) actions will open a backdoor to Reparations for black Americans.
How many children kill someone everyday in America? Will parents be charged for their children’s action in the future? Why wasn’t Brendan Depa’s parents charged for giving him that Nintendo Switch? Can Brendan Depa’s parents also be sued by the teacher for damages?
My sister-in-law’s sister’s 12-year old daughter committed suicide with her father’s pistol. Can parents now be charged for their children’s suicide?
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How does the FBI get away with not being culpable in these shootings? If the school’s administration and/or teachers were involved, then why was Colt Gray allowed back into school. Sounds like poor investigations & administration to humble me…
OK…you’re right.
OK… just read some of neo’s other posts on the Crumbley case. Guess there is already a precedent on this. I either forgot or didn’t know about the charges in that case.
So, the child who takes parents firearm into a store, blows the cashier’s head off and steals the money doesn’t cause the parents to ‘break any Law?!
Sounds like Selective Enforcement and quite typical of the Rule of Law (AKA King’s Law)…
Another episode in the ongoing saga ‘Prosecutors are Sh!ts’.
The mother of the shooter has a long arrest record. Why arrest the father ?
The fbi could have charged the fathet with perjury for denying he had the weapons which had been returned in 2022 so they throw the ‘rule of law’ in the shredder
The fbi could have charged the fathet with perjury for denying he had the weapons which had been returned in 2022 so they throw the ‘rule of law’ in the shredder
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Did the father swear to that in an affidavit or oral testimony?
From – ‘Rule of Law’ is the shredder of Rights…question:
The Enforcer’s Edict is the Grinder of Liberties…so says Bing AI
The mantle of order feeds the silent unraveling of liberties…so says ChatGPT AI
Yes, why was the father charged, but not the mother?
I can relate to neo’s concerns about charging parents, but also to the arguments that parents have a responsibility for their minor children.
What I cannot imagine is the justification for charging one parent and not the other.
I think at least part of the reason for the charge is that dad bought the gun his son used for the massacre and gave it to the boy as a Christmas present after the visit from the FBI checking on the son making threats to shoot up the school. I think you could make a reasonable case that dad is guilty of contributory negligence that led to the homicide.
An involuntary manslaughter charge seems more appropriate to me than murder, but on the other side of the coin, it could be argued the dad had the same status as the getaway driver in a bank heist gone bust. The driver didn’t shoot anyone, but is just as guilty of murder. In other words, felony murder where you did not do anything directly, but materially contributed to what did happen.
In my mind you can make a case that the father’s behavior is more egregious than that of the Crumbleys. Buying the kid a gun after he has made threats to use a gun – and not absolutely locking up the firearms in the house seems more than just a tad negligent.
I have a problem with charging the father with murder, without him pulling the trigger.
Yes i find accessory to thd crime rather tangential the bureau didnt have the records for the previous event they couldnt look it up they chase down 69 year old grandmothers with cancer give me a break
I could see Civil Liability for the dad in cases like this, but not criminal liability.
Are they going to charge the mothers of gang bangers in inner cities for their kids crimes ?
State laws vary on the definitions of homicide charges. I could be wrong, but I think the two second-degree murder charges on the father relate to Georgia law which makes accessory to death of a minor an upgrade from manslaughter. This applies to the deaths of the two students. Apparently the father’s charges stem from his having allowed his son unfettered access to the gun which was used in the murders. The son is charged with four more serious charges, first-degree murder.
According to what I’ve read, the previous FBI encounter was in another county in Georgia. The boy insisted that he wasn’t the source of the online threat, that he would never say such a thing, and the father told the Sheriff that he controlled his son’s access to the guns in the house, which were for hunting. It’s possible the father is being charged now, in the neighboring county to which they moved, because investigation found he did NOT control his son’s access to the guns.
Certainly some serious negligence charges are called for.
“And if the 14-year-old son is being tried as an adult (which he is), why are the
parents considered responsible for murder instead of some sort of negligence?”
That’s what causes the most cognitive dissonance for me. If the kid is being charged as an adult, that means he’s fully responsible for his actions…so how is the father to blame? Either the kid’s an adult, or he isn’t.
I would agree that negligence is an appropriate charge, but charging the father as if he were directly responsible for murders he committed by another is pretty scary.
I taught my kids to shoot when they were young. They’re now adults (heck, a couple of my grandkids are adults now). Were they to snap and commit a murder, can I be held responsible?
Such displacement can occur, but only to the ugly and disfavored. See the Crumbley case (Oxford, MI).
The school had the kid in the office, the parents, and did not check the kid’s backpack.
But those are People Like Us and thus immune from such prosecution,
Another Free Pass for the FBI.
They are notified about a student threatening to shoot up a school. The student tells them he did not make the threat – end of investigation.
How did FBI investigators miss that tidbit?
Father may have physically purchased the gun, a legal act, but is other parent not an equal partner in “giving a present”? And was it only the father’s responsibility to control his son’s access to it?
How are such distinctions made in the law? Like I said above, I can see both sides of charging parents argument, but the father and not the mother in a family living together doesn’t make sense to me.
According to the Daily Mail, the mother is drug-addicted and abusive, with a criminal record, and was under court order to have no contact with the father.
When the original complaint was investigated, in Jackson County, GA, the FBI couldn’t prove the boy had made the online posts. I don’t know, and I think the information is not yet public, whether the boy’s “obsession” with the Parkland shooting was known or expressed at the time of the previous investigation.
As is almost always the case, early reports can be confusing, and it’s wise to wait for fuller information.
I hope there are relatives who are not crazy and who can take charge of the younger children.
“How does the FBI get away with not being culpable in these shootings?”
I’m with Karmi here…they can chase down every last person from J6, but this kid makes threats, when we know these sorts of threats often lead to doing the deed, and NOW they come after dad.
FBI needs to go the way of the buggy whip.
this is just so indirect. usually the person charged in such manner was also perpetrator, perhaps the driver who killed someone in a dui, but charging the dad in this case is like charging a dad who let his 15 year old son taking a family car out for a joy ride and ended up killing someone… I know it is not completely similar but it is just so far fetched and indirect….
Are they going to charge the mothers of gang bangers in inner cities for their kids crimes ?
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Deplorables get charged. Regime pets do not.
So the latest scoop is that the kid went all shooty because he was “upset about the way transgender people are treated.” I already saw the mug shot and immediately thought, “OK, he’s gay/trannie/non-binary/etc.” Having noticed that, I assumed that his case would be going under the media radar in short order. But now that the authorities have decided to slap his old man with a homicide (including actual murder, not just negligent homicide/manslaughter) the story seems to have gotten new legs. Oh, and did I mention the lovely mother of the perp? This family is a veritable cornucopia of dysfunctionality.
Steve (retired/recovering lawyer): I haven’t seen the bit about “how transgender people are treated,” but I have seen allegations that the shooter was “bullied” over being “gay.” The problem with that line is that this was the shooter’s first day at this new (to him) school.
And the Daily Mail has gone overboard about photos of the kid on multiple hunting outings with his father. Lots and lots of boys his age go hunting with relatives and never shoot up a school.
Obviously, there’s something wrong with a kid who would do such a thing, and reports of family problems are no surprise.
America has a shaky relationship with the concept of equal justice and the rule of law.
Venezuela keeps getting closer in our judicial rearview mirror.
I expected at some point they might charge the father because of the previous alleged shooting threat by the son, even though no one was charged with a criminal act then. However, he, the father, has been charged almost immediately after the fact which is strange to me.
Democrats using it as a hammer to admonish MAGA is not surprising though.
This is more serious than the Crumbley case. If you get the FBI or GBI or AnythingBI to go away by saying that your son has no access to your firearms, you better not give him a gun of his own. The FBI has a lot to answer for and maybe they should be charged or investigated or purged, but this dad was more in the wrong and had less excuse than a lot of parents.
I don’t know where the shooter was living, but the parents were separated, maybe divorced, and the mother was a real basket case, so whatever her real flaws, I doubt she can be charged in this particular matter.
Abraxas:
We have no idea what the father actually said to the FBI, but whatever it was it wouldn’t make him liable for murder. My guess is that they were told that the boy would not have access to a gun without supervision; that the firearms in the house would be locked up. A parent could give a teenager a gun as a gift but keep it locked in that manner. We also don’t know how this particular kid got access to the gun – was it just lying around? Was it in an unlocked place? Was it in a locked place and he got the key or combination? All sorts of possibilities. But the worst ones seem to me to only be criminal negligence.
Sins of the son are now apparently inflictted on the father. I was a gun operator and eventually owner since I was 11. All involved except me are now dead. I forget what age you had to be to pass the hunter safety course in Kali but I had a shotgun since I was 11. Not once did it occur to me on my classmates or family. Not once. I have to answer to God.
My father knew I wasn’t going to just blow up and destroy my world. He didn’t have to worry about me because he raised me,
IMO, there was never a justification for federal law enforcement to be investigating these households unless he was making threats to parties out of state. In New York law, ‘menacing’ is a class b misdemeanor, so the allocation of time to the case by the local offices of the federal police should have been minor. If the feds actually stayed in their lane, the U.S. Attorney’s office would bring federal charges for menacing as an appendix to the state’s case, which should be tried in superior courts in Georgia based on investigations conducted by local police. The state police should be on hand to provide technical assistance to local police. If the state police require more rarefied technical assistance, they can place a requisition with the feds.
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When you don’t live in clown world with unscrupulous grandstanding a**holes as prosecutors (assisted by enabler judges), culpability is personal. I can imagine civil liability for lack of due diligence in the Crumbley case and this one, but the criminal charges are obscene unless you can demonstrate the parents were guilty of an anticipatory offence (‘solicitation’, ‘conspiracy’, ‘attempt’, or ‘facilitation’ in New York law).
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This type of thing reminds me that we should consider the use of MMPI and other psychological tests on aspirant prosecutors to weed out the sociopaths.
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Another thing we might consider is to STOP ELECTING PROSCUTORS. Have multi-county superior jurisdictions. When a district attorney’s position is open or due to open, anyone in the state would be eligible provided they (1) were eligible by law to seek election to a superior court judgeship in some part of the state and (2) had spent at least four years (FTE) working as a staff prosecutor during their time as a member of the bar. You might add an additional requirement that the applicant be between 55 and 72 years of age at the time the position was due to open. The respective county boards would choose representative[s] to an examining committee which would proceed by weighted voting. The examining committee would sort through the resumes and announce it’s preliminary interview list. If a critical mass of county board members signed a petition to add another candidate to the interview list, the list would be duly expanded. The committee than interviews each candidate and sends the transcripts to the other county board members. A convocation of county board members proceeding by weighted voting would then meet and have a multi-round ballot or cast a ranked-choice ballot with multiple rounds of tabulation. The new DA so installed might have a grace period after which he’d be subject to retention-in-office referenda every four years or he might serve until he was compelled to retire but could be deposed through a petition recall or removed in impeachment or incapacity hearings. He’d be mandated to retire at age 76, or when he’d held the office for 12 of the previous 14 years, or because he was ineligible to stand for a retention referenda (which might be any time past the calendar year he reached his 72d birth day). You could use a similar set of screens and procedures to chose public defenders and state attorneys-general and to regulate their tenure.
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And can we please scarify the federal penal code? So many of these cases are gummed up by the gratuitous intervention of federal officials, federal prosecutors, and federal judges.
Part 1
It is gonna be more than rough on Colt Gray in prison. Once knew a young inmate who had been in since he was 15-16 years old. We were in a 9×7 (actually 8.5’ by 6.5’ finished) cell with 3 other inmates—3 on the floor and 2 on tiered bunks. One day a trustee brought a note—addressed to a “Nancy”.
That young inmate, maybe 23-25 by then, snapped “give me that!” I was still new in the prison system, so it caught me by surprise. Later, I found out the note had come from a cell further down—filled with ‘Fuck boys’ – gay young men.
“Nancy” once told me, when just the two of us were in the cell, what he was in for – *WARNING* not for the squeamish or ‘Goody Two Shoes’ .. will continue in next comment.
Part 2 *WARNING* #2
“Nancy” was queer at an early age, and left home for somewhere around Miami Beach to Fort Lauderdale (don’t recall). He was 14-15, and was living with 3 older males (seems they were 30-35 or so).
Ralph was the older dominate ‘male’ – and he pissed “Nancy” off one day. Forgot how it all started, but “Nancy” killed one of the adult males, chopped him up, and used a garbage disposal to get rid of most of the body, if I recall correctly. Cleaned up.
“Nancy” waited for the next adult male to come home, and killed him. See above paragraph for what happened to the body.
Ralph came home. He managed to escape the first attempt on his gay-life, and a chase started—young “Nancy” with a huge kitchen knife chasing Ralph around the apartment, then around a living-room table. “Nancy” said Ralph was running so fast that he came up behind “Nancy” – if I recall correctly, this is around the time “Nancy” killed Ralph.
Ralph was somewhat overweight, and his body parts soon clogged up the garbage disposal. “Nancy” still had other body parts from the first 2 gay men, and big body parts from Ralph.
“Nancy” went out, still somewhat bloody, and purchased 2-3 trunks (I forget). Remaining body parts were put in the trunks, and the trunks were shipped to … … maybe Philadelphia, but am not positive.
To make a long story shorter, “Nancy” was arrested and charged with 3 murders. Forget when it actually happened, but at some point during or after the trial, it was discovered that “Nancy” was still a juvenile. This was a long time ago, so am not sure if adult age was 17 or 18 at that time. Ended up avoiding the death penalty, and just got a long prison term.
After some years in prison, “Nancy” apparently developed a serious case of hemorrhoids and/or something worse (??) because he set on the toilet a lot…not looking good for Colt’s future, IMHO.
The question of whether the Crumbley case is more, less, or about as serious as this with regard to prosecuting the parents is not the point.
Point is, People Like Us are not going to be prosecuted.
The prosecutor in the Michigan case assured all that neither the school nor any individual associated with it would be prosecuted. Displacement is discerning, apparently.
But. They’d had the kid and his parents in the same room, trying to get the latter to take the former home. Refused. Shooting followed. As bad as the thing had to be to call in the parents, nobody had the idea–or perhaps the moral courage–to check the kid’s backpack.
Not sure if anything could be found by touching it. Picked up my granddaughter from kindergarten some years back and decided I hadn’t carried that proportion of my body weight before being in the Army.
Have to open it and take stuff out.
Didn’t do it. In the context and not even considering what happened, gross negligence.
But the educators are People Like Us and not subject to displacement issues.
That pattern will persist.
Are they going to charge the mothers of gang bangers in inner cities for their kids crimes ?
My wifes co-worker, single mom, petite, has a son. At the time of incident, 16 years old, around 5’11, 180. High school football player, wrestler, baseball.
He was getting in trouble and one night snuck out, got drunk and she caught him sneaking back in the house. Gave him a good talking to and slapped him a few times.
Telling story to classmates and laughing about it, a teacher overheard. Teacher called chid protective services. Mom ends up in trouble, numerous threats from govt, ends up settling for anger management classes, and un-announced visits from CPS.
Had a friend in High School.Athelete, consistent honor roll student. Dad Air Force colonel, mom stay at home, older brother jet pilot. Kind of a Leave it to Beaver family. Anyway, friend did 2 restruant burglaries that I am aware of without getting caught, probably more .Finally was arrested after setting a rival’s house on fire.
On a minor note, in my circle of young, unlicensed teenage friends, was not unusual to take mom and dad’s extra car out for a spin while mom and dad were at work.
So, I always laugh when I hear people say the “I blame the parents”.
He didn’t have to worry about me because he raised me,
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Glad your family life is predictable and orderly. I can introduce you to people who were passable parents but produced disastrous children.
Telling story to classmates and laughing about it, a teacher overheard. Teacher called chid protective services. Mom ends up in trouble, numerous threats from govt, ends up settling for anger management classes, and un-announced visits from CPS.
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Teachers and social workers are adept at persuading people to regard teachers and social workers with disrespect. The one occupational segment better at that would be school administrators.
The Babylon Bee says the FBI has assured us that the next ten mass shooters are on their radar.
The “do-gooders” don’t seem to realize is that when the kids know their parents will also get charged with crimes that the kids do, those kids will then be able to manipulate their parents. A kid that doesn’t like the way his (or her) parents discipline the kid, then the kid will do some crime to also get his parents thrown in jail.
But there is something wrong with the culture today. When I was a kid, MANY decades ago, everyone (kids included) had access to guns, yet nobody took a gun to school to shoot anyone. We would get into fist fights, but nobody even took out a knife in a fight (even though just about every kid (including many of the girls) carried a pocket-knife).
Rusty
The US military, when changing small arms ammo, dumped a quarter million M1 carbines into the economy. Thirty-round mags from the M2 were available and fit. An assault weapon; light, reduced-power cartridge, semi-auto, large-cap mag.
The NRA would sell you one for twenty bucks [for context, that was about twelve hours at minimum wage] as a premium for joining.
Nothing. Not until Columbine where, as it happens, the most killing was supposed to be done by a propane bomb the guys had rigged. Fortunately, it didn’t work.
There have always been guns handy among the population, guns being around are not a new phenomenon. Heck, I had relatives who brought “souvenir” guns home from World War II. We had plenty of ammo, too*. So it is not a question of “guns are too available”; instead, it is a failure of the popular culture.
* A few years ago, one of my cousins and me shot off about 250 rounds of 70 year old WWII M-1 carbine ammo. 249 rounds went bang when they should have, only had 1 dud. Of course, we shot it off at a gun range.
When people always want to ban guns because some idiots use them to murder, I like to ask those folks why they don’t try to stop drunk driving by taking cars away from sober drivers.
PS to any left-wingers reading this, I will NEVER surrender my firearms! Just so they know.
Darrell Brooks (aka “who?”) didn’t need a gun.