Suspect's father in Georgia shooting deaths charged, following example set in Michigan

The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of killing four people and injuring nine others during a shooting rampage this week at a Georgia school was arrested and charged Thursday, becoming the latest example of prosecutors holding parents responsible for their children’s actions.

The Apalachee High School shootings on Wednesday in Winder, Georgia, once again brought gun violence into the national spotlight, with Americans nationwide expressing sadness, frustration and outrage with what appears to be increasing gun violence in schools.

More: Georgia school shooting suspect to appear in court; father arrested. Live updates

And to Michiganders, many details of the shooting, and the charges, sounded familiar.

Earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley — the mom and dad of Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 when he brought a handgun to Oxford High School and fatally shot four people and injured six — became the first parents to be convicted in a mass school shooting.

And Thursday, in an CNN interview, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said the facts in the Michigan case were "very egregious and hopefully very rare," but added that, in the Georgia case, given the details that have emerged "it would be hard to argue that dad didn't know that there might be a concern."

Whether criminal charges against parents in extreme shooting cases, as in Oxford and Winder, can curb gun violence remains to be seen, but it raises the legal — and societal — question: To what extent should parents be held responsible for their children's crimes?

More: 'Slow the f--- down': Grosse Pointe mom's texts to son may come back to haunt her

Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, was charged with two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said.

Colt Gray, who was taken to the Gainesville Regional Youth Detention Center, was charged as an adult with four counts of felony murder for the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers, Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53.

The GBI said Thursday evening that the charges against the father, who reportedly had been part of an investigation about a shooting threat a year ago, stemmed from him "knowingly allowing" his son to have a weapon.

He was held, online jail records show, at Georgia’s Barrow County Detention Center with no bond.

School shooting similarities

Since Wednesday, as law enforcement has investigated and news outlets have reported, similar patterns between the Georgia high school shootings and the one in Oxford have emerged.

Among the similarities: the boy’s young ages, descriptions that they were someone who was quiet, what appeared to be a troubled family relationship and cries for help, warning signs to authorities that went unheeded, and accesses to the weapons that may even have been gifts.

Colt Gray, according to law enforcement, was reportedly armed with what USA Today reported was "an AR-platform style" weapon. AR, often in the context of an AR-15, stands for ArmaLite Rifle and is commonly used to refer to a civilian semi-automatic weapon.

Gray also is among a small group of teens charged in a mass shooting and what the Washington Post called "the youngest mass school shooter since 1998," when two boys in Arkansas, age 11 and 13, "took aim outside their middle school, killing five."

CNN has reported, based on two unnamed "law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the investigation" Colin Gray, who was divorced, told investigators that in December "he had purchased the gun used in the killings as a holiday present for his son."

Crumbley’s gun, a Sig Sauer 9 mm, was purchased by his father and, by one account, was a gift.

Moreover, according to reports on the shooting in Georgia, there appears to have been some warning signs of the shooting, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealing it had received tips about online threats to "shoot up a middle school."

In addition, in various news reports, relatives and others who knew Colt Gray said he lived in a hostile, unstable environment, and seemed to be someone who needed help, but one person said, appeared to have fallen through the cracks.

Holding parents responsible

Efforts to use the legal system to force parents to take responsibility for the actions of their children’s behavior is hardly new, according to an archived report by the justice department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

The report highlighted a Michigan case from the mid-90s that received national media attention as an example of local and state efforts to fight youth crime by enacting laws that imposed liabilities on parents for "the delinquent behavior of their children."

In that case, a jury convicted Susan and Anthony Provenzino of St. Clair Shores of a misdemeanor, violating a city ordinance that required parents to "exercise reasonable parental control" over their children, who were not yet 18.

The jury concluded the Provenzinos were responsible for the actions of their son, who the report called troubled and said was arrested in connection with burglary, drinking alcohol and using and selling marijuana. The son also, the report said, had verbally and physically attacked his parents.

The report, which tracked how the American legal system has held parents accountable for their children’s misdeeds going back to the 1900s by imposing monetary penalties, noted that in the 90s, authorities were taking steps to hold parents criminally liable, particularly when related to firearms.

Preventing gun violence

But since then, as the ongoing policy debates about guns show, Americans have struggled to reach a consensus on what should be done to prevent gun violence.

After Jennifer Crumbley’s manslaughter conviction, Tim Carey, a law and police adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, talked about the implications of the case and the importance of laws that restrict child access to firearms.

Carey suggested that there have not been more parent prosecutions because shootings are tragedies, and in many cases the suspects take their own lives.

In many cases, he added, the facts aren’t clear.

In the Crumbley case, however, he said, they were, and convictions could help raise awareness.

And, increasingly, when it comes to the human cost emotional realities of the school shootings, even those who have been trained to be dispassionate professionals, find it hard to not to feel — and express — something about them.

Don Schanche, a retired Georgia journalist who lives about an hour away from Apalachee High School, for example posted a link to an Associated Press report about the shooting on social media topped with a few of his own thoughts.

The shootings, he said, weighed on him because it was close to him and "very sad." One of his daughters teaches drama at different Georgia high school, and his grandson also is a senior there. They both, he added, have been on his mind.

"This needs to stop," he wrote, repeating the sentence three times. "We can stop it. When will we stop it???"

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: In Georgia school shooting, similarities emerge to Crumbley case