Should a father go to prison for fatal parenting mistakes?

In the days after the Georgia school shooting that took the lives of two students and two teachers, a disturbing picture has emerged about the alleged shooter’s home life. The 14-year-old lived with his father, apart from his mother and two siblings. The mother had numerous run-ins with law enforcement regarding domestic violence and drug possession. The father owned guns that the alleged shooter had access to, including an AR-15, although he said they were always unloaded.
Authorities believe they have ample evidence to charge the father, Colin Gray, with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree murder and cruelty to children. If convicted, his son, despite his age, will surely spend much if not all of his life in prison.
With the loss of innocent life, it’s hard to summon sympathy for the Gray family, especially now that we know there were signs, more than a year ago, that the teen may have been flirting with the idea of violence.
And yet.
Listening to snippets of audio released from interviews with law enforcement more than a year ago, it also becomes clear that the enormity of the tragedy includes a father who seems to have been struggling with how to best parent his child in the midst of domestic chaos.
In the audio, obtained by an Atlanta TV station, the teen denies being involved in a discussion on a gaming platform about a school shooting, which federal authorities learned about via a tip. “I promise I would never say something like that,” the boy says, in a tone of voice that every parent has heard from a child desperately trying to avoid punishment for something they’ve done.
And then the father is heard, expressing frustration. Yes, he has guns and allowed his son to use them, because he wanted his son off video games and wanted him to spend more time outdoors. He’d taken his son hunting and he’d recently shot his first deer. He said he talked to his son about school shootings and talked to him about how he’d been “picked on” by classmates. The father said he was on a first-name basis with people at the school because he’d been going there so often to see “is everything OK — that’s why I keeping going up there.”
A jury will decide if Gray did enough to help his son and to prevent what happened this week at Apalachee High School. And there will be many more details to come that may alter the picture. But any parent who has ever lost sleep over a child can understand, at least a little bit, the frustration in Colin Gray’s voice. He sounded like a man who was trying to get this parenting thing right, and couldn’t understand how, despite his best efforts, he was falling short.
Parenting books and the advice of other parents are helpful for learning how to get a child to sleep through the night, or potty-trained, or how to get them through a losing T-ball season or a bad grade, or any other manner of challenges. They’re not as useful about what to do when a child’s world has imploded because of bad choices their parents made, and what to do when they are growing older and acting out in troubling ways, and your objectivity about your child and his behavior is compromised because of your blinding love for your child.
Ever since the Columbine shootings rocked America in 1999, parents of school-aged children have struggled with a challenge our own parents didn’t have, or at least didn’t think much about — how can we know if a future school shooter is sleeping under our roof? We’ve been told what warning signs to look for – including loneliness, social isolation, irritability, anger — traits that can be seen in even the most well-adjusted kids.
And amid increasing distrust of institutions, many parents believe, on some level, that it’s their family against the world. We’ve heard stories, or know firsthand of, of overreach by authorities, such as the case of Justina Pelletier, the Massachusetts teen whose parents took her to a hospital for medical care and then were prevented from taking her home for more than a year after doctors refused to release her to her parents’ custody. There are enough of these sorts of cases that they’ve been given a name: medical kidnapping.
Worries like these are not driven by political ideology. Both liberals and conservatives worry about the ways in which a single report to Child Protective Services can upend a family’s life, with some arguing that these agencies need to be abolished because of the effects on Black families, in particular.
These are the kinds of fears that percolate under the surface when a parent is faced with the terrible question of whether their child might be capable of unimaginable violence. This is not to excuse Colin Gray of mistakes he may have made, or James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents accused of involuntary manslaughter in the school shooting their son carried out in Oxford, Michigan, in 2021.
The texts presented to the jury in Jennifer Crumbley’s case were truly shocking, including messages from the son to his mother asking for help that went unanswered, to the mother laughingly telling her son to learn not “to get caught” with ammunition at school. The parents were both found guilty and sentenced to prison.
Similarly, there are reports that the teen charged in the Georgia shooting had asked for help, which he had not received. “The adults around him failed him,” the teen’s aunt told The Washington Post.
All of this is a somber reminder that parenthood is not just a blessing, but a grave responsibility, and as states are increasingly empowered, even pressured, to hold parents accountable for their children’s deeds, there are three possible outcomes.
First, knowing that they may go to prison if their child becomes the next school shooter, some parents will be more attuned to their children’s mental health, and less likely to let their children have access to guns.
Conversely, some parents might be scared into doing nothing, afraid of being blamed for their child’s problems, afraid of their child being taken away if they seek help for them — and for themselves. To counter this risk, communities must conduct frank assessments not only what is necessary to keep schools safe, but also what resources are available to assist parents struggling to deal with troubled children, often completely on their own.
And finally, there may be parents who did everything they could, parents who were conscientious and thoughtful and did what they thought was right by their child and their community, who might go to prison if every parent’s nightmare still happens despite their best efforts.
That’s a trade-off that families grieving in Georgia right now might be willing to accept.