The U.S. and Georgia state flags are lowered at half-staff following Wednesday’s shooting at Apalachee High School, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024, in Winder, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

WINDER, Ga. (AP) — The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at a Georgia high school and wounding nine others was arrested Thursday and faces charges including second-degree murder and manslaughter for allowing his son to have a gun, authorities said.

It’s the latest example of prosecutors holding parents accountable for their children’s actions in school shootings. In April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first to be convicted of a mass school shooting in the U.S. They were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for failing to secure firearms in their home and failing to acknowledge their son’s deteriorating mental health before he killed four students in 2021.

Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of child abuse, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference.

“These charges stem from the fact that Mr. Gray knowingly allowed his son, Colt, to possess a firearm.” Hosey said. “His charges are directly related to his son’s actions and allowing him to possess a gun.”

In Georgia, second-degree murder means that a person caused the death of another person by committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. It is punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison, while premeditated murder and premeditated manslaughter carry a minimum sentence of life in prison. Involuntary manslaughter means that someone unintentionally causes the death of another person.

Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with murder in the shooting Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta. Arrest warrants obtained by the AP accuse him of using a semiautomatic assault rifle in the attack that killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine others.

The teen denied threatening to shoot up the school when authorities questioned him last year about a threatening post on social media, according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday.

Conflicting evidence about the origin of the post prevented investigators from arresting anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the May 2023 report and found nothing to support charges at the time.

“In this respect we have not failed at all” Mangum said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We did everything we could do with the resources we had at the time.”

When a sheriff’s investigator from neighboring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy was struggling with his parents’ separation and was frequently bullied at school. The teenager often shot and hunted with his father, who photographed him with deer blood on his cheeks.

“He knows how serious a weapon is and what it can do, as well as how to use it and how not to use it” Colin Gray said, according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff’s office.

The teenager was questioned after the sheriff received information from the FBI that Colt Gray, then 13, “probably threatened to shoot up high school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to a sheriff’s office report.

The FBI tip pointed to a Discord account linked to an email address associated with Colt Gray, the report said. But the boy said “he would never say something like that, even in jest” according to the investigator’s report.

The interview transcript quotes the teenager as saying: “I promise I will never say anything where…” the rest of the denial is inaudible.

The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a digital evidence trail indicating it was accessed in various cities in Georgia, as well as Buffalo, New York.

The attack was the latest in dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including notably deadly ones in Newtown, Conn.; Parkland, Fla.; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have sparked heated debates over gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children grow up trained in shooting drills. But the nation’s gun laws have changed little.

Classes were canceled at a Georgia high school on Thursday, but some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with their heads bowed.

When the suspect slipped out of math class Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath thought her quiet classmate, who had recently transferred, was leaving school again. But he returned later and tried to return to class. Some students went to open the locked door, but instead they retreated.

“I suspect they saw something, but for some reason they didn’t open the door” said Sayarath.

The teenager then opened fire in the hallway, authorities said.

Sayarath said she heard a series of 10-15 shots. Students fell to the floor and crawled, looking for a safe corner to hide.

Two school resource officers confronted the shooter within minutes of the shots being reported, Hosey said. The teen immediately surrendered.

Gray remained in the regional juvenile detention center Thursday. His first court appearance was scheduled for Friday morning.

Hosey said he was charged with the murders of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53.

At least nine other people — eight students and one teacher at the Winder school — were injured and taken to hospitals. All were expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.

Authorities have not provided a motive or explained how the suspect obtained the gun and brought it into the school, which has about 1,900 students in a rapidly developing neighborhood on the outskirts of Atlanta’s growing metropolitan area.

It was the 30th mass killing in the U.S. this year, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 people died in those killings, which are defined as incidents in which four or more people die within 24 hours, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.

There have already been cases in which someone who was once on the FBI’s radar but was not arrested has committed violence.

A month before Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at a Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018, the bureau received a tip that he had talked about committing a mass shooting. The FBI also investigated a tip about a person who was later convicted in the fatal shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado in 2022.

The pattern underscores the challenges law enforcement faces in trying to determine when disturbing behavior escalates into crime. Investigators sift through tens of thousands of tips each year to try to determine which ones might pose a real threat. Cases like the Georgia school shooting raise new questions about whether more investigative work could have prevented the violence.

The sheriff’s report says Investigator Daniel Miller spoke with the boy and his father on May 21, 2023. The father said his son had access to a gun in the home.

“I mean, they’re not loaded, but they’re down there” According to the transcript of the hearing, Gray’s father said:

He captioned a photo on his cell phone from a recent hunting trip with his son: “You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer.” Gray’s father called it that “the best day of my life.”

The teen told Miller he stopped using Discord several months earlier after his account was hacked.

“I have to take your word for it and I hope you’re honest with me” Miller replied.

The phone number associated with the account was linked to another person in a different Georgia town, the report said. The account’s profile name, written in Russian, was translated to Lanza. Investigators noted that Adam Lanza was the perpetrator of the 2012 mass shooting that killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The sheriff’s office notified local schools to continue monitoring the teen. However, investigators concluded “I was unable to confirm the information I received from the FBI and take further action.”

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Martin reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writers Charlotte Kramon, Sharon Johnson, Mike Stewart and Erik Verduzco in Winder; Trenton Daniel and Beatrice Dupuy in New York; Eric Tucker in Washington; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Kate Brumback in Atlanta; and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.