SerpApi.Org
On July 28 and 29, Colin Gray will be sentenced at the Barrow County Courthouse in Georgia. This March, he became the first parent in American history to be convicted of murder for a school shooting carried out by his child. A jury took less than two hours to convict him on 27 counts for his role in the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High School, where his 14-year-old son Colt killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine others with an AR-15-style rifle given to him by his father. Colin Gray didn’t carry out the shooting but was found guilty of second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment, cruelty to children, and knowingly allowing his son to have a weapon. He faces up to 180 years in prison.
It isn’t the first time a parent has been charged in a shooting carried out by their child. But it is the first second-degree murder conviction for a parent, establishing a new legal standard. It also raises a question the rest of us now have to answer: What are we going to do about the children we can still save?
I have been asking that question for most of my career. During my sophomore year at a private high school in New Jersey, a freshman girl I knew pulled me into a bathroom stall to show me her father’s loaded gun. She was coming apart—she was overweight, bullied, and, I now understand, probably suffering from untreated bipolar disorder. She asked me what she should do. I could feel what she wanted me to say: I told her to put the gun back in her father’s safe. I believe that had I said anything else, she would have used that weapon.
That moment sent me into psychiatry and, eventually, into the study of mass shooters. For the past decade, I have worked with colleagues at the Stanford School of Medicine to study these school shooters’ psychology, their childhoods, and the warnings many around them saw and few acted on. We built a clinical picture of dozens of attackers, examining psychiatric history, psychiatric diagnoses, and what treatment, if any, they had received. What emerged was a pattern. The overwhelming majority came from childhoods of abuse, neglect, and dislocation. They were invisible children whose psychiatric emergencies had been misread as behavioral problems or ignored entirely. Almost all of them were screaming for help long before they ever pulled a trigger.
I thought about every one of them when I read the case files of Colt Gray.
Like so many shooters our research team studied, Gray was trapped in a cycle of paranoid, homicidal, and suicidal ideation, repeatedly begging for mental health care that his parents ignored. When he was 11, school officials found a search on his tablet for how to kill his father. He cycled through six schools in five districts before he was 14. As an eighth grader, he missed virtually the entire school year, incapacitated by panic attacks and paranoid delusions. Georgia law requires chronic absenteeism to be reported to child welfare authorities; it was reported, but no one followed up. Gray begged his parents to take him to a psychiatrist. He kept what police investigators later described as a shrine to the Parkland shooter above his computer. In 2023 the FBI investigated him for online threats made under a username referencing the Sandy Hook gunman. Agents identified Discord photos that matched the interior of the Gray family home and had every reason to assume that there were firearms on the property. But when the sheriff visited, they accepted his father’s denials and left without inspecting a single weapon. Making terroristic threats against a school is a felony in Georgia. Had Gray been charged, a judge could have ordered him to be removed from a home where he had access to guns. He wasn’t charged, and the case was closed.
At St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, where I ran the psychiatric emergency room for many years, I regularly encountered adolescent boys brought in for throwing furniture, lashing out in ways that looked like discipline problems—and discovered, on deeper evaluation, undiagnosed early-onset schizophrenia. I have studied Kip Kinkel, who killed his parents and two classmates in Oregon in 1998. He had paranoid schizophrenia so severe that voices commanded him to kill, but his illness remained undiagnosed until he was in handcuffs. I have studied Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, whose early-onset schizophrenia was misinterpreted as selective mutism, in part because of profound cultural stigma in his family. In case after case, the illness was there to be found. The child was asking to be seen. The adults around them chose not to look.
Seven months after the FBI visited the Gray home, Colin Gray bought his son an AR-15 for Christmas and took him to a shooting range. Later, he added a tactical vest and a scope. Clinically, I believe he was attempting to bond with a boy he didn’t know how to reach—to make a struggling, powerless child feel capable. But misguided intention does not absorb catastrophic results. You do not put a firearm in the hands of a child who is begging for a psychiatrist. Gray did not merely ignore the fire in his son. He handed him the accelerant.
Three weeks before the shooting, lobbying from Annie Brown, Colt Gray’s grandmother, had almost paid off. After years of urging schools and caseworkers to get her grandson help, she had finally secured an inpatient psychiatric bed for him—no small feat in our overwhelmed system—fractured her ankle in the effort, and left the follow-through to Colin Gray. He did not take his son to the facility. The next morning, Colt Gray walked into Apalachee High School, carrying his father’s rifle.
Psychosis is among the most terrifying states a human being can inhabit. To know that your child is in that state and choose denial is a form of child abuse. A Georgia jury has now ruled that in Colin Gray’s case, it was also murder.
The verdict matters. But we need to be clear about what it does not yet fix. For decades, we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars hardening school buildings with metal detectors, school resource officers, bulletproof desks, and active-shooter drills in which children play dead. The research is unequivocal that these measures do not deter mass shootings. What works comes earlier, and it costs less: a teacher who notices the quiet, smoldering boy in the back row and moves him to the front. A counselor who follows up. A child-welfare system that responds when a student misses months of school. A father who drives his son to a psychiatrist.
Even when good intentions are there, systems can fail. In San Diego, warning signs around then-16-year-old Caleb Vazquez were taken seriously—police were alerted, the FBI was notified, and his father’s guns were seized. He had previously been placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold. But the system appears to have released him without transitioning him to intensive outpatient care, and he and a 17-year-old he had met online opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing three men. As in nearly every case I have studied, radicalization unfolded online, in a space that family interventions and gun removals alone cannot reach.
Gun violence has been the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers since 2020. No other industrialized nation lives this way.
The Gray verdict begins to close one gap. What comes next is up to the rest of us. We need mandatory psychiatric follow-through when a child makes documented threats—not a deputy at the front door accepting a parent’s word. We need funding for the psychiatric beds that grandmothers should not have to break their ankles to secure. And we need every adult near a struggling child to understand that reaching toward that young person is not intrusion. It is the work of saving lives.
This tragedy did not begin at the schoolhouse door. It began at the kitchen table. Colt Gray was not born to do what he did. He was failed into it, again and again, by the people and institutions that had every chance to act. And somewhere right now, in a home not unlike his, another child is asking to be seen. We already know how to see them. We just have to decide that we will.
