Is holding parents accountable for their child’s mass shooting crime enough to break the cycle of violence?

For the past two weeks, prosecutors in Barrow County, Georgia, have been arguing that Colin Gray ignored red flags about his son’s mental health before the teen allegedly opened fire at Apalachee High School in 2024, killing two teachers and two students. 

The Apalachee case marks the third time a parent has been charged for their connection to a mass shooting allegedly carried out by their child. Following the 2021 shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan, prosecutors convicted the gunman’s parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley. They were each sentenced to 10-15 years in prison. It was the first time that parents had been held criminally responsible for their child’s mass school shooting.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more than 80 mass school shootings at U.S. schools since the 1999 Columbine massacre. Steve St. Juliana, who lost his 14-year-old daughter, Hana, in the Oxford shooting, said something needs to change. 

“Our society refuses to take significant action to protect our children. So, one of the only places that we can put this back onto are the parents,” he said. 

He’s not alone in advocating for increased accountability. Buck Myre, whose son, Tate, was killed in the Oxford shooting, said he doesn’t feel the nation has learned the needed lessons about prevention which could have stopped the shooter from killing four students at Oxford High. 

What happened in Oxford, Michigan 

On Nov. 30, 2021, 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley, walked the halls of Oxford High School armed with a 9-millimeter handgun, killing schoolmates Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre, Justin Shilling, and Hana St. Juliana. It was the deadliest school shooting in Michigan’s history. 

Three days after the shooting, in an unprecedented move, prosecutors in Oakland County filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the shooter’s parents, arguing there were red flags about their son’s behavior for months.

According to court documents, in the weeks leading up to the shooting, the boy texted his mother on multiple occasions that he saw demons in the family home. Three months before the shooting, the teen assured a friend he was kidding after he texted that “it’s time to shoot up the school.” 

The troubling conduct escalated the week of the attack. According to court testimony, the day before the shooting, a teacher emailed administrators that the student had been looking at “different bullets” online while in class. A school employee left a voicemail for his mother, who did not respond. She later texted her son, “Lol I’m. not mad, you have to learn not.to.get caught.”

The next morning, just hours before the shooting, another teacher alerted administrators that the sophomore’s math worksheet had drawings of a gun, a bullet and a person bleeding. It also had the words “the thoughts won’t stop,” “help me” and “blood everywhere.” 

The 15-year-old was taken to a guidance counselor’s office and his parents were called in for a meeting that lasted just 12 minutes. The counselor testified that he recommended therapy and suggested the Crumbleys take their son home but they refused, citing work.

The parents left the school, and the teenager was allowed to return to class. His backpack was never checked. Two hours later, surveillance video shows the teenager made a trip to the bathroom, pulled a gun out of that backpack, entered the hallway and started shooting.

Police later found his journal on the bathroom floor. It detailed his desire and plan to shoot up his classmates. 

Investigators later learned that just three days before the attack, the boy’s mother had taken him to a shooting range with a 9 millimeter handgun, which his father had purchased for him as an early Christmas present.

Similarities to Apalachee case

The 14-year-old alleged gunman in the Apalachee High mass shooting also displayed a series of red flags for months leading up to the tragedy. According to investigators, he wrote step-by-step plans in a notebook, including diagrams and potential body counts, and had a poster of the Parkland shooter hanging on his bedroom wall. As was the case in the Oxford shooting, the teen allegedly brought a gun to school in his backpack, and began shooting after leaving a bathroom. The gun was also purchased for him by his dad as a Christmas gift.

The teen was indicted on a total of 55 counts, including murder in the deaths of four people and 25 counts of aggravated assault. His father, Colin Gray, faces 29 charges, including second-degree murder and manslaughter.

While both of the parents in the Oxford High case were held accountable, only the father in the Apalachee case has been charged. The district attorney prosecuting Gray alleged that he allowed his son access to a firearm and ammunition, even after he was warned that his child was going to harm others. Both Gray and his son have pleaded not guilty. 

Accountability after school shootings

In the Oxford case, the shooter pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life in prison. His parents were each convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter for failing to safely secure the gun and ignoring their son’s need for mental health help. They were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison.

“I think there was plenty of red flags there for them to be aware that he was in crisis,” St. Juliana said of the parents. “Their answer to that was to go buy him a gun and take him shooting, which there’s nothing wrong with that activity in and of itself. But when that’s your answer to a child in crisis, that’s a problem.” 

Both St. Juliana and Myre want to take accountability further and focus on not just teen shooters and their parents, but also schools.

“We can’t let them off the hook. This was preventable,” Myre said. 

Lawsuits filed by the victims’ families against the Oxford School system have been dismissed because of Michigan’s government immunity laws, which protect public entities and their employees from being sued. 

Investigating the mass shooting

For years, Myre and St. Juliana have been calling for a state-led investigation into the Oxford High School shooting. When a school shooting happens, there are no national standards or federal mandates for state reviews or investigations. And typically, the FBI is only required to investigate if the shooting was considered an act of terror or a hate crime.

In May 2022, after months of pressure from the community, the Oxford School Board hired Guidepost Solutions, a private security firm, to conduct an independent investigation. Guidepost doesn’t have the legal authority to compel testimony, so of the 161 people they asked to interview, Guidepost reported that approximately 70 refused or would not respond, including two school employees who met with the shooter just hours before the incident. 

The district told 60 Minutes that many staff members gave depositions in court proceedings, but according to Guidepost, those interviews didn’t fully address all of their questions. Guidepost concluded Oxford High teachers acted appropriately by immediately raising concerns but the investigators faulted the school for not following established threat assessment protocols, writing in their report, “this tragedy was avoidable.”

The Michigan attorney general’s office says it is now investigating.

What the research shows on ways to prevent school shootings

James Densley and Jillian Peterson are professors of criminology and founders of the St. Paul, Minnesota nonprofit, the Violence Prevention Project. Together they have spent the last 10 years researching hundreds of mass shootings. Through their work, they’ve interviewed both shooters and people who knew them to better understand their pathways to violence and how to stop them. 

“You think about all the things that were learned after 9/11, and how that created an entire infrastructure and an apparatus around dealing with terrorism, we don’t see that same type of urgency with the mass shooting problem,” Densley said. “Instead, we get sort of ‘thoughts and prayers.’ We get a situation where we pit off imperfect solutions against each other, because no one can agree on anything. And then that creates a situation where there’s no action.”

Peterson said their research has found a consistent pattern among shooters. 

“We saw an early childhood with a lot of pretty significant violence, or neglect, domestic violence in the home, that kind of laid the foundation,” she said.

In each interview with a mass shooter, Peterson asked if anyone or anything could have stopped them. “Every person we talked to said ‘yes.’ One of them even said, ‘I think anyone could have stopped me,'” Peterson said.

Their research shows that over 90% of all school mass shooters broadcast their plans online or in person before they commit the atrocity. 

Investigators say the gunmen in Parkland, Florida, Uvalde, Texas, Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia; and Newtown, Connecticut, all told people about their intent before the attacks.

What schools can do to prevent mass shootings

Many school districts have responded to the increase in school shootings by installing metal detectors or requiring clear backpacks, but Peterson says that’s not the best use of resources.

 “You’re better off spending resources on things like teams that communicate with each other, right, school-based mental health, crisis intervention, suicide prevention,” Peterson said. 

And the data, she said, bears that out.

“The best thing we can do to prevent violence is not to push kids out, it’s to actually pull them in,” she said. 

Denseley and Peterson are testing their research in St. Paul, Minnesota, through a pilot program designed to teach school staff how to identify kids in crisis and connect them with services.

In 2022, after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Congress passed a bipartisan bill that included over a billion dollars towards expanding school-based mental health services and staff. Last April, the U.S. Department of Education discontinued the majority of those grants, explaining that the programs conflicted with the administration’s priorities. 

In December, the department awarded $208 million for credentialed school mental health providers, a fraction of the original funding. 

St. Juliana, still grieving the loss of his daughter, said something has to change.

“Gun violence is the number one killer of our children in America and our society currently seems to have its head in the ground in refusing to acknowledge this, just saying, ‘Oh, it’s the way it is.’ No, that’s a ridiculous answer,” St. Juliana said. “This is not something that is insurmountable. We can make great strides to prevent this from happening again. We just aren’t.”