Colin Gray, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, reacts after a jury convicted him of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter at Barrow County Courthouse in Winder, Ga., Tuesday. (Abbey Cutrer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, pool)

WINDER, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia man who gave his teenage son the gun he’s accused of using to kill two students and two teachers at a high school was convicted Tuesday of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.

Jurors took less than two hours to find Colin Gray guilty of all charges in the September 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, northeast of Atlanta. Gray now joins a growing number of parents being held responsible in court after their children were accused in shootings.

Colin Gray was found guilty of second-degree murder in the deaths of two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo. Georgia law defines second-degree murder as causing the death of a child by committing the crime of cruelty to children. Gray was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the killings of teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53.

Another teacher and eight other students were wounded. Gray was also convicted of multiple counts of reckless conduct and cruelty to children.

Gray showed little emotion as the verdict was read and each juror was polled by the judge. Deputies then cuffed his hands behind his back as he stood at the defense table, speaking with his lawyer. He will be sentenced at a later date. Second-degree murder is punishable by at least 10 but no more than 30 years in prison, while involuntary manslaughter carries a penalty of one to 10 years in prison.

Some relatives of victims wept as the verdicts were read. They declined to comment after court. Gray’s defense lawyers left without speaking to reporters.

“We talk a lot about rights in our country,” Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith said after the verdict. “But God gave us a duty to protect our children, and I hope that we remember that, as parents, as community members, to protect our children because that is our God-given duty.”

The teen’s mother, Marcee Gray, wasn’t charged. She testified that she had urged her estranged husband to take any guns and lock them inside his truck so they would not be accessible to their son. She and Colin Gray were separated in the months leading up to the shooting, and Colt Gray lived mostly with his father during that time. She declined to comment when reached by phone after the verdict.

Prosecutors said Gray gave his son the gun as a Christmas gift and allowed him access to it along with ammunition despite the boy’s deteriorating mental health. They said he had “sufficient warning that Colt Gray would harm and endanger” other people.

Fourteen at the time of the shooting, Colt Gray has pleaded not guilty to a total of 55 counts, including murder. A judge has set a status hearing for mid-March.

Investigators said Colt Gray carefully planned the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at the school attended by 1,900 students.

He boarded the school bus with a semiautomatic, assault-style rifle in his book bag, the barrel sticking out and wrapped in poster board, investigators said. He left his second-period class and emerged from a bathroom with the gun and shot people in a classroom and hallways, investigators said.

Colin Gray knew his son was obsessed with school shooters, even having a shrine in his bedroom to Nikolas Cruz, the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, prosecutors said.

“It wasn’t like one parent missed one warning,” Smith told reporters. “This was multiple warnings over a lengthy period of time and, like we said, you just had to do one thing — take that rifle away and this would have been prevented.”

Gray is the latest U.S. parent taken to court for when a child is accused of gun violence. A look at other cases:

Shooting at private school

In Wisconsin, Jeffrey Rupnow is charged with intentionally giving a dangerous weapon to a person under 18 causing death. In 2024, his daughter, Natalie Rupnow, 15, killed a student and a teacher at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison and then killed herself.

Prosecutors said Rupnow told investigators that his daughter was struggling to cope with her parents’ divorce and that he bought her guns as a way to connect with her.

Rupnow’s attorney has argued that he acted reasonably. Natalie had passed a gun safety course, and Rupnow took the extra step of keeping guns in a safe, Lisa Goldman said at a hearing in July 2025.

Oxford school shooting

Jennifer and James Crumbley were the first U.S. parents held criminally responsible for a mass school shooting committed by a child. They are serving 10-year prison terms for involuntary manslaughter.

Their son, Ethan Crumbley, killed four students and wounded others at Michigan’s Oxford High School in 2021. The school revealed his violent drawings to the Crumbleys a few hours before the shooting, but they declined to take him home. No one checked his heavy backpack for a gun.

The Crumbleys were not aware of their son’s plans, but they had given a gun as a gift a few days earlier. Prosecutors said Ethan’s actions were foreseeable and that the Crumbleys had failed to prevent the violence.

July Fourth tragedy

Robert Crimo Jr. pleaded guilty to misdemeanors for endorsing his son’s Illinois gun permit in 2019 despite knowing that Robert Crimo III had expressed suicidal thoughts.

Three years later, Crimo III killed seven people at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, a suburb north of Chicago.

“He was criminally reckless the moment he submitted that affidavit,” prosecutor Eric Rinehart said of the father.

Crimo Jr. was sentenced to 60 days in jail. His son is serving a life prison sentence after pleading guilty in March to murder.

Boy, 6, shot teacher

Deja Taylor was prosecuted in state and federal court after her 6-year-old son took her gun to school and wounded a teacher in a classroom full of students in Newport News, Virginia, in 2023.

Taylor was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for a drug-related crime connected to possessing a gun. Separately, she was sentenced to two years in state prison for child neglect.

“That is my son, so I am, as a parent, obviously willing to take responsibility for him because he can’t take responsibility for himself,” Taylor told “Good Morning America” in 2023.

The teacher, Abigail Zwerner, told a judge she wasn’t sure “whether it would be my final moment on Earth.”