Swift charges against Georgia father mark a cultural shift on school shootings

For two days, prosecutor Karen McDonald had debated whether to pursue a case against the mother and father of a 15-year-old school shooter who had killed four students at Oxford High School in suburban Detroit.

Several of her most senior attorneys adamantly opposed the idea, arguing that the legal system is built on precedent, and for what she proposed doing, none existed. But McDonald, persuaded in part by the fact that Jennifer and James Crumbley had given their son a 9mm pistol as an early Christmas gift before the November 2021 shooting, was not deterred.

“We’re charging the parents,” she told her staff, and in separate trials three years later, McDonald succeeded in making the Crumbleys the first mom or dad of a school shooter ever convicted of homicide.

Now, after the decision Thursday by Georgia prosecutors to charge the father of a 14-year-old accused of killing two students and a pair of teachers at Apalachee High School, the Michigan case no longer looks novel and, instead, may have signaled a fundamental change in the way that the justice system deals with gun owners whose alleged negligence allows their children to end lives with a firearm.

The counts against Colin Gray - which include second-degree murder - are the most severe ever filed against the parent of an alleged school shooter, and the speed at which they were leveled - less than 36 hours after the last shot was fired - is without precedent.

Georgia officials have provided little detail about what led them to target Gray, beyond alleging that he “knowingly” allowed his son, Colt, to access the AR-15-style rifle that investigators say the teen used in his attack. A year ago, local police interviewed both of them about alleged online threats the teen had made to shoot up a school, accusations that Colt denied at the time. Gray told the investigators that he had “hunting guns” but that his son didn’t have “unsupervised access” to them.

Legal experts suspect the decision to prosecute Gray would have been unlikely, and perhaps impossible, without the lessons learned from Michigan over the past three years.

Not only did McDonald’s team outline a successful legal strategy, the case demonstrated that holding irresponsible parents accountable for crimes committed by their children could be a rare point of consensus in the nation’s polarized gun debate - including among gun-owning jurors outraged at parents who failed to secure their weapons.

While the Michigan convictions were secured by a liberal prosecutor in a Democratic-leaning area, the charges in Georgia have been filed in a conservative county where 7 in 10 voters supported Donald Trump in 2020.

The Crumbley convictions marked a “psychological breakthrough” for other prosecutors, said John Acevedo, who teaches at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta. “That allows the district attorney to not appear to be novel or anti-gun, but rather just more law-and-order focused.”

If Georgia officials are eyeing Michigan as a legal model, though, they signaled this week that they intend to take a different approach, at least stylistically.

While McDonald spoke frequently and openly about the broader importance of the Crumbley case in its early days, District Attorney Brad Smith was understated, and unwilling to discuss much of anything beyond his case, in brief comments to reporters Friday.

“I’m not trying to send a message,” he said, making no mention of Oxford High or its role in his decision. “I’m just trying to use the tools in my arsenal to prosecute people for the crimes they commit.”

To Mark Blankenship, a former prosecutor in western Kentucky, Smith’s case against Gray represents a potential cultural shift.

In 2018, Blankenship, a registered independent, had floated pursuing charges against the stepfather of a 15-year-old boy who opened fire at Marshall County High, killing two students and wounding 14, with a 9mm pistol he had taken from his parents’ bedroom closet. But Blankenship’s colleagues pushed back - arguing that he would never find a jury in their staunchly pro-gun community willing to convict a parent for what his teenager did with a gun.

Blankenship never sought to indict, deciding that no state law had been broken. Months later, though, he lost reelection, blaming the end of his political career on the mere suggestion that he might hold the parent of a school shooter accountable.

Now, Blankenship said, even pro-gun conservatives who may oppose firearm bans and other restrictions are fed up with the perpetual pattern of violence. Between the 2018 attack in Kentucky and the one Wednesday morning in Georgia, there were 207 shootings at K-12 schools, according to a Washington Post analysis. In those cases, 95 people were killed, another 216 were wounded and more than 183,000 students were exposed to gun violence on their campuses.

“People have gotten sick and tired,” Blankenship said, in trying to make sense of what’s changed since 2018. “Our society is now so weary with hearing this, ‘Not another one. It can’t be.’”

At the press conferences in Georgia, there was no talk of Colt Gray’s family having “suffered enough,” as there has been in past cases, another sign to Blankenship that, even in the parts of the country that most cherish the Second Amendment, the desire for justice can extend beyond simply pursuing the suspect wielding the gun.

Well before the new charges in Georgia, the Oxford case had undermined the widespread notion that gun owners oppose all gun safety reform.

After closing arguments in Jennifer Crumbley’s trial, the jurors took an initial poll, according to three of them, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe their deliberations. Every gun owner on the panel voted guilty from the start, never vacillating.

One of them, a professional with adult children, said he was persuaded to convict, in part, by the appalling lack of “gun safety culture” in the Crumbleys’ home.

“There was no evidence of that, at all… For me, that was huge,” he said. “I don’t waver on gun safety.”

If, as in Oxford, Gray’s case goes to trial, one of the prosecution’s biggest challenges will be explaining the complexities of applicable law.

In Michigan, McDonald and her co-counsel, Marc Keast, had to prove that the Crumbleys had been “grossly negligent,” a level of disregard that goes beyond carelessness. Though the attorneys didn’t have to present evidence that the couple knew their son would commit an act of violence, they did have to show jurors that what he did was “reasonably foreseeable.”

Georgia law presents similar challenges, according to legal experts. To prove the second-degree murder charge, Acevedo said, requires “negligent cruelty to a child” that leads to their death - in this case, the two 14-year-olds killed at Apalachee. On Friday, Smith acknowledged to reporters that he had never before charged someone with that crime.

A murder conviction could be difficult, Acevedo said, which likely explains why Gray is also charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter. A jury would have the option to acquit on the former but convict on the latter.

To explain the counts’ differences, Acevedo presented a hypothetical. If an adult served a minor alcohol at a party, and the child later died in a car crash, the adult could face involuntary manslaughter. If the adult served a child drinks until the kid died of alcohol poisoning, that could be considered “cruelty” and fit the state’s definition of second-degree murder.

Each prosecution, legal experts say, would have benefited from the existence of safe-storage laws in their states. Such legislation has gradually risen in popularity over the past two decades, with 26 states and D.C. passing a statute of some kind requiring gun owners to safely store their firearms, according to the Giffords Law Center, an organization that advocates for gun-safety legislation. Violations are typically misdemeanors, but legal experts said their mere existence on the books creates a baseline expectation of gun owners that attorneys can reference at trial.

Michigan had no safe-storage law at the time of the Oxford High shooting, a point the Crumbleys’ attorneys raised repeatedly in court. A statewide poll after the shooting, though, showed broad approval for one - with support from 76% of gun owners and nearly two-thirds of National Rifle Association members.

Georgia doesn’t have a safe-storage law.

For McDonald and Keast, the links between their work and the Apalachee case have been impossible not to grapple with.

“There was always this big question that loomed about whether or not our case would make a difference,” McDonald said. “Would people start asking, ‘Where did this person get the gun?’”

“If nothing else that comes of this, it stands for that - that we’re going to ask these questions,” she continued. “And if, you know, a rural county in Georgia and their law enforcement immediately singled on, ‘Where did this gun come from?’ That’s something.”

At the same time, she and Keast have struggled to process the most harrowing parallels. In both shootings, four people died. The accused teens were similar in age at the times of their respective attacks. Each used a gun that, investigators allege, had not been properly secured.

“I’m getting texts about the charges in GA telling me that I should be proud. I don’t,” Keast wrote to McDonald, just hours after the father there was charged. “I feel like we failed because we didn’t prevent this.”

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Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.