What Colin Gray’s murder conviction means for gun-owning parents

By Eric Levenson, CNN

(CNN) — The conviction of Colin Gray on murder and manslaughter charges is not the first time a parent has been found responsible for a mass shooting committed by their child.

Nor is it likely to be the last.

Legal experts told CNN that Gray’s conviction on Tuesday in Georgia sharpens a message made clear two years ago in the trials of Jennifer and James Crumbley in Michigan: Parents can be convicted of serious crimes if they allow their mentally unstable child access to a firearm that is then used to kill. And that serious crime can now include murder.

“The Crumbley case was the first case where parents were held responsible for their child who committed murder and participated in a mass shooting, but Colin Gray is the first one I’m aware of where he was charged and convicted of murder,” said Elyse Hershon, a criminal defense attorney based in Boston who followed the Gray trial.

“I see this as an escalation of the trend that started with the Crumbleys, and it’s not going to end here.”

Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith, who led the prosecution of Gray, said explicitly that was his desire in bringing the case.

“We hope that it moves the needle a little further,” he said after the verdict.

The Gray trial is part of a broader push to hold more people accountable for a school shooting, including the shooter’s parents and responding law enforcement officers.

Jennifer and James Crumbley were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison for their role in the 2021 mass shooting carried out by their teenage son at Oxford High School.

In addition, the father of the Highland Park, Illinois, parade shooter pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges related to signing his son’s firearm application. In Wisconsin, the father of the teenage girl who killed two people at a Christian school faces felony charges for allegedly allowing her access to weapons.

Still, Gray’s case stands out among this group for its seriousness. After less than two hours of deliberations, the jury convicted him on all 27 charges, including two counts of second-degree murder. The murder charges come with a sentence of 10 to 30 years in prison, meaning the 55-year-old could ultimately spend the rest of his life behind bars.

“It is by far the most serious conviction we’ve ever had in this country of a parent being charged with the actions their child did,” said Jean Casarez, CNN’s trial correspondent who closely followed Gray’s case and the Crumbley cases. “Crumbley was a manslaughter conviction. This is murder.”

On a practical level, the prosecution’s success in these cases is a signal to gun-owning parents to get a gun safe or lock, CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson said.

“Any parent, for future reference, boy they’re going to have multiple locks on any types of weapons they have in that home, and they’re going to be taking precautions aplenty,” he said.

The Crumbleys and the Grays

The case against Colin Gray the past two weeks was altogether similar to the cases against the Crumbley parents in early 2024.

In both situations, a parent purchased a gun for their teenage son as a Christmas gift, and the gun was then left unsecured. Meanwhile, their son was showing signs of mental health problems yet were not put into counseling or therapy. Their trials featured emotional testimony from shooting survivors about the terror of the mass shooting.

But they weren’t just connected by general similarities. In an unusual twist, part of the evidence in Gray’s trial was his apparent knowledge about the Crumbley convictions.

About a week before the September 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School, Colt Gray’s mother, Marcee Gray, searched on Google for “school shooter parents charged with manslaughter.” She then found and read a CNN article about the Crumbley cases and what their convictions meant for parents, according to search records presented in court. She testified she and her son had watched a documentary about the Crumbleys.

After the Google search, Marcee Gray called her estranged husband, Colin Gray, multiple times, phone records show. She testified she asked him to put away his unsecured guns to prevent their troubled teenage son from accessing them. He declined to do so because “he didn’t want to deal with” the “sh*tstorm” that would ensue, she testified.

Smith, the district attorney, said that connection showed the importance of the Crumbley cases.

“Michigan was able to move the needle to the point that it almost stopped this tragedy,” he said Tuesday. “We don’t know how many tragedies it did stop.”

He said prosecutors had considered charging Marcee Gray, too. But she had lost custody of Colt due to her struggles with drugs and alcohol and did not possess the firearms used in the case, Smith said.

“We found what she did to be morally reprehensible. We do not believe she is a good mother, in my opinion,” he said. “But at the end of the day, she did not have custody of Colt, she did not have proximity to Colt, and she was not the one that provided him the firearms.”

Accountability or slippery slope?

In closing arguments of Colin Gray’s trial, defense attorney Jimmy Berry said Gray tried his best to help his son but simply didn’t have warning about his violent plans. He was being inappropriately prosecuted for his son Colt’s actions, not his own, Berry argued.

“This is the person who needs to be punished,” Berry said, holding up a photo of the teenage shooter.

Yet prosecutors said the case against Gray was about accountability and that Gray was being punished for his own negligence.

“This was a trial about this defendant’s actions, his choices, and his responsibility,” Smith said.

Shannon Smith, Jennifer Crumbley’s attorney, told CNN at the start of Gray’s trial she believed these cases represent a “slippery slope” making every parent responsible for their child’s actions.

“To say that it was foreseeable is just so dangerous,” she said. “There’s so many things that can be considered foreseeable to any parent, if this is considered foreseeable.”

Hershon similarly said she believed the Gray case was a slippery slope for all parents.

“It’s only in hindsight that it’s easy to say, ‘You should have done this,’ ‘You should have done that,’” she said.

Andrew Fleischman, a criminal defense attorney in Atlanta, said he found the implications of Gray’s conviction “troubling.” Still, he said, juries generally don’t think about policy and instead focus on what’s fair in the specific case before them.

“They’re really not supposed to think about policy, and they’re not supposed to think about sympathy. Of course they do. But I don’t think jurors really sit down and think, what are the policy implications of my conviction or whatever,” he said.

Regardless, this case represents a “watershed moment” for prosecutors seeking accountability for gun violence, Joey Jackson said.

“We see them saying, ‘If you’re not going to fix the gun laws, well we’re going to prosecute under the existing laws,’” Jackson said.

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CNN’s Isabel Rosales contributed to this report.