Court charges the father of a 14-year-old boy accused of shooting and killing four people at a high school in the US state of Georgia with murder with the prosecution saying the father could have stopped the murder but failed to stop.
Colin Gray, 54, is facing four charges of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight of cruelty to children.
Officials said the charges were directly connected to his son’s actions and “allowing him to possess a weapon”.
The son, Colt Gray, is accused of killing two teachers and two students in Wednesday’s shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, near Atlanta.
He is due in court on Friday charged – as an adult – with four counts of murder.
In Georgia, state law allows prosecutors to charge minors from age 13 as an adult in certain crimes.
This means they face potentially more severe sentences if convicted.
The charges against the father are thought to be the most severe levelled against the parent in this kind of case.
In May 2023, the FBI alerted local police to online threats about a school shooting, associated with an email address linked to the suspect.
A sheriff’s deputy went to interview the boy, who was 13 at the time.
His father told police he had guns in the house, but his son did not have unsupervised access to them, the FBI said in a statement on Wednesday.
Officials say the threats were made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, and contained images of guns.
The account’s profile name was in Russian and translated to the surname of the attacker who killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.
A police incident report describing last year’s interview with the boy and his father was released on Thursday.
In the report, a deputy described the boy as “reserved” and “calm” and said he “assured me he never made any threats to shoot up any school”.
They said he claimed to have deleted his Discord account because it was repeatedly hacked.
Colin Gray also told police his son was getting picked on at school and had been struggling with his parents’ separation.
Police records reveal that the boy’s mother and father were in the process of divorcing, and he was staying with his father during the split.
The teen often hunted with his father, who told police he had photographed his son with a deer’s blood on his cheeks.
The boy’s maternal grandfather told the New York Times he partly blames the tumultuous home life after Mr Gray’s split from his daughter.
