Georgia case highlights growing trend of parental accountability laws

States are increasingly trying to hold parents responsible for the mayhem their children unleash in school shootings.

Georgia authorities this month quickly filed murder charges against the father of a 14-year-old accused in a deadly shooting at Apalachee High School near Atlanta.

Courts in Michigan and Virginia have sentenced parents to years behind bars after their children opened fire on students and teachers.

Charging parents with felonies is a new prosecution tactic that applies state laws against parents for reckless or negligent supervision of their children.

“We have now seen this happen twice in a relatively short period of time,” said Andrew Willinger, executive director at Duke Center for Firearms Law. “There is this intuition when you read about what happened in these cases that the parents should be suffering consequences of some kind.”

Georgia

Prosecutors charged Colin Gray, 54, with involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder in the fatal shootings of two students and two teachers last week at Apalachee High School in Winder, about an hour’s drive from Atlanta. Nine other people were wounded.

Mr. Gray’s 14-year-old son, Colt, is accused of opening fire with an AR-15-style rifle and has been charged as an adult with murder.

Authorities said Mr. Gray allowed his son to have access to guns despite knowing he was a threat. Law enforcement flagged a threat on social media tied to Colt last year and asked Mr. Gray whether he secured access to guns from his son.

According to the transcript of that exchange, Mr. Gray said Colt “knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them.” Mr. Gray said he and his son hunted together.

Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said the charges against Mr. Gray “are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon.”

Brad Smith, the prosecutor on the case, said he is not trying to send any sort of message with the charges.

“I’m just trying to use the tools in my arsenal to prosecute people for the crimes they commit,” Mr. Smith said.

Georgia’s law on second-degree murder can be used against anyone who causes the death of another person while “in the commission of cruelty to children in the second degree.” It carries a punishment of 10 to 30 years in prison.

The state’s law on involuntary manslaughter holds someone liable if they cause the death of another person by an unlawful act, even if the killing is unintended. It carries a punishment of one to 10 years in prison.

Tim Carey, law and policy director at Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said prosecutors are likely charging Mr. Gray with second-degree murder in addition to manslaughter because he gave his son an AR-15-style rifle for Christmas.

“The four involuntary manslaughter charges arise from the two teachers that were murdered, as well as the two children, in case the second-degree murder charges don’t stick,” Mr. Carey said.

“Prosecutors are exploring whether the unique emphasis in Georgia law on the cruelty to children dimension of second-degree murder can hold the shooter’s father liable in this case. If successful, they would be the most severe conviction of any school shooter’s parent.”

Michigan

Michigan was the first state in the country to convict the parents of a school shooter of murder.

James and Jennifer Crumbley were convicted of involuntary manslaughter this year. Their 15-year-old son killed four students at Oxford High School, roughly an hour outside Detroit, in 2021. They are appealing their convictions while serving 10-year prison sentences.

They did not know that their son, Ethan, was planning a mass shooting, but school officials told them that he had drawn a gun and blood on one of his assignments with the words, “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me. My life is useless.”

They did not remove Ethan from school on that notice. Neither the parents nor the school checked Ethan’s backpack in which he kept the handgun.

The gun was a gift from his father.

Virginia

In December, Deja Taylor was sentenced to two years in state prison for felony child neglect after her 6-year-old son shot his teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia. The teacher survived.

Federal prosecutors charged Taylor with possessing marijuana and lying about it when she purchased a firearm in 2022. That was the firearm her son used to shoot his teacher. Taylor used it in a separate incident against her son’s father after seeing him with his girlfriend, reports show.

She was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison on the marijuana and gun charges. The federal and state sentences total nearly four years.

There was no indication that the gun had been kept in a lockbox, ABC News reported.

Legal experts say felony charges holding parents accountable for school shootings are relatively new, so they have no evidence that the tactic can decrease violence.

“I am not aware of data informing the impact of using negligence crimes to hold parents accountable for contributing to the reasonably foreseeable crimes committed by their children. It would be an interesting angle of future study,” Mr. Carey said.

Studies on safe storage laws do show a promise of curbing fatalities. According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 26 states have laws to hold adults responsible for the safekeeping of firearms to prevent them from ending up in the hands of minors.

Daniel W. Webster, a professor at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, said some studies show child access prevention laws have decreased homicides.

“The research, some of which I have led, has shown that [child access prevention] laws reduce the risk of teen suicide, unintentional shootings of children and teens, and homicides committed by juveniles,” Mr. Webster said.

• This article is based in part on wire service reports.