by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
In a stunning victory for commonsense, law enforcement officials in the state of Georgia yesterday arrested a father for being complicit in the deadly crimes committed by his son. The father's arrest was starkly reminiscent of the arrests and subsequent convictions of parents James and Jennifer Crumbley after their son, who was fifteen at the time, murdered four of his classmates in a Michigan high school in 2021.
The individual arrested yesterday in Georgia was Colin Gray, the 54-year--old father of the 14-yeear-old high school student who was arrested the previous day and charged with killing two students, two teachers, and causing injury to several others. Authorities are saying that Mr. Gray is being charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children. The father could face up to 180 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
The 14-year-old boy, a high school freshman, is being charged as an adult with four counts of felony murder. The boy is facing the possibility and likelihood of life in prison.
The FBI received information in the May of 2023 indicating that the young man who would later become the school shooter was making on-line threats regarding a potential school shooting. That agency informed the Jackson County Sheriff's Department in Georgia where the youth was residing with his father, and the sheriff's department interviewed the father and son. The son denied making any on-line threats and said his social media account had been hacked. The father said that he had hunting rifles in the household that were not loaded. He said that he had been trying to teach his son to hunt and that the boy had shot his first deer that year. The Jackson County Sheriff's Office reported to the FBI that they had no grounds to hold the father or son, and that they would make local schools aware of the allegations regarding the boy.
(The boy's mother and father were separated, and she was living in a separate residence where she had custody of two younger children. The mother was arrested for keying the father's truck, and arresting officers found drugs and drug paraphernalia in her possession, for which she was sentenced 46 days in jail.)
Seven months after the father and son had been interviewed by their local sheriff's department and the father had denied that his son had unsupervised access to weapons, the father purchased an AR-15-style assault rifle for his son as a Christmas gift. The father's arrest warrant states that he provided his son with a firearm with "knowledge that he was a threat to himself and others."
James and Jennifer Crumbley were each sentenced to 10-15 years in prison for enabling their son to kill his classmates. Mr. Gray already had a clear wake-up call on the possibility of his son becoming a school shooter, and he chose to make the boy's Christmas extra-special later that same year with the gift of an assault rifle. Clearly he owns a significant portion of the blame for what went down at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, this past Monday.
Gun deaths in American schools are directly related to the ease with which young people can acquire guns, and the ready availability of assault weapons maximizes the flow of blood down the hallways of our schools. And yes, Republicans are right on one thing: mental health is a significant issue in school shootings. It's a shame they refuse to do anything to address it.
1 comment:
When a political party covets guns, profits, and dark money over the lives of children thoughts and prayers is the best they have to offer. Whether it is the demagogic suggestions that the Second Amendment forbids any and all regulation of firearms, that ill conceived border walls and mass exportation of undocumented immigrants will resolve America's immigration policy, or that deregulation of industry will result in a cleaner natural environment all the GOP offers is political theater. They don't know how to govern anymore.
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