The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of killing four people at his high school in the US state of Georgia has been arrested.
Colin Gray, 54, was charged on Thursday with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Authorities have charged his son, Colt Gray, with four counts of murder and said they plan to prosecute him as an adult.
The shooting on Wednesday at Apalachee High School in the city of Winder left two teachers and two students dead, and nine others injured.
“These charges stem from knowingly allowing his son Colton to possess a weapon,” said Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI) Director Chris Hosey said in a news conference on Thursday evening.
He pledged that agents will “work tirelessly to complete this investigation as we move forward”.
Officials are investigating whether the AR-style weapon used in the attack was a gift purchased by Mr Gray in December 2023, law enforcement sources told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.
CNN reported that the weapon was a Christmas present to his son.
In May 2023, the FBI sent local sheriff’s deputies to interview the boy and his father after being alerted to threats to commit a school shooting posted online.
The boy, who was 13 at the time, denied that he had posted the comments.
His father told investigators that “he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them”, the FBI said in a statement on Wednesday.
“At the time, there was no probable cause for an arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state or federal levels,” the FBI statement said.
In April, the parents of a Michigan teenager who killed four students with a gun they purchased for him just days before the shooting were sentenced for their role in the attack.
James and Jennifer Crumbley were both found guilty of manslaughter and each sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.
The case was thought to be the first time the parents of a child who carried out a mass shooting have been held criminally liable.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated
