The arrest of a Georgia father in a mass school shooting allegedly committed by his son shows the precedent set by Oakland County’s prosecutor securing guilty verdicts against two parents in the 2021 Oxford High School shooting, legal experts said Friday.

The convictions earlier this year of James and Jennifer Crumbley for involuntary manslaughter have created a path for prosecutors across the country in instances where parents ignored warning signs posed by their children or failed to keep weapons secure, the experts said.

Colin Gray, 54, the father of accused Georgia school shooter Colt Gray, was charged Thursday with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said.In Georgia, second-degree murder means a person has caused the death of another while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. It is punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison. Involuntary manslaughter means that someone unintentionally causes the death of another person.

Earlier this year in Oakland County, two juries convicted James and Jennifer Crumbley of four counts each of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of Oxford High School students Justin Shilling and Madisyn Baldwin, both 17; Tate Myre, 16; and Hana St. Juliana, 14. Prosecutors presented evidence that Ethan Crumbley’s parents bought him the gun he used a few days before the shooting despite warning signs about his mental health. They were each sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison, while the shooter is serving a life sentence in prison that his new appellate attorneys are appealing.

The Crumbley cases created a new avenue for prosecution — and accountability — that the national legal community was watching, said Mark Chutkow, a Bloomfield Hills-based former federal prosecutor and now defense attorney who leads the government investigations section at the Dykema law firm.

“Defense lawyers and prosecutors around the country were watching the Crumbley case as a seminal case for how to address mass shootings in schools, where the community is looking for accountability and understanding of how something like this could happen,” Chutkow said.

Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald, in a statement on Friday, noted that the mass shooting at Georgia’s Apalachee High School — which claimed four lives, as in Oxford — “appears to have eerie similarities to the Oxford High School shooting.” She also noted the investigation in Georgia remains ongoing.

“We know from the research that mass shooters display warning signs leading up to their attacks, which we saw was the case with the Oxford shooter and also appears to be the case with the Apalachee shooter,” McDonald said in the statement. “Any responsible gun owner knows you must secure your weapon. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can prevent gun violence and should not accept this as normal any longer.”

Meghan Gregory, whose son Keegan survived the Oxford High School attack after being trapped in a bathroom with the shooter, said she’s thankful for the message sent by the charges against Gray.

People need to understand the consequences of their own actions and those of their children, she added.

“It solidifies the importance of being a parent and being present in your children’s life,” Gregory said. “To let him (the shooter) have access to the gun, and on top of that, it is an AR? This is a serious weapon.”

Georgia authorities charged 14-year-old Colt Gray with murder in the Wednesday shootings outside Atlanta. Arrest warrants obtained by the Associated Press accuse him of using a semiautomatic rifle in the attack, which killed students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53. The shooting wounded nine other people, who authorities say are all expected to survive. He will be tried as an adult.

Colin Gray is accused of providing a gun to his son despite knowing he posed a threat to himself and others.

Chutkow said cases against parents seem to hinge on whether they ignored obvious warning signs that their children posed a threat. He said he expects the investigation in Georgia to probe further into whether Colin Gray knew about his son’s possible fascination with other school shootings and whether he either kept certain details from law enforcement or lied. The teen denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when authorities interviewed him and the father last year about a menacing post on social media, according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday.

“I think many people look to government, law enforcement, to protect their most vulnerable members of society,” Chutkow said. “Certainly, children would be the prime part of society to protect, and so they may not be satisfied with just expressions of sympathies or prayer for the victims. The community may want action.”

But accountability shouldn’t stop at charging parents, said Craig Shilling, the father of Oxford victim Justin Shilling.

Shilling supports the charges against Colin Gray, but he and other parents of Oxford victims have voiced frustrations about the findings in a third-party review commissioned by the Oxford school district that concluded the shooter slipped through the school’s threat assessment and suicide intervention systems.

The parents have wanted to know whether school officials had broken any mandatory reporting laws. Several Oxford teachers and staff members noticed troubling behavior by the shooter — such as researching bullets in class and the violent drawing he made — according to evidence presented during the Crumbleys’ trials, but none of them believed he posed a threat to others or searched his backpack the day of the shooting.

They have fought for an independent review of the emergency response to the November 2021 attack. The Oakland County commission approved $500,000 on Thursday for such a review.

“Charging the parent takes away from some of the other problems. … It’s not solely the parents’ responsibility, especially when there are all these red flags. It should be school counselors; police; CPS (Children’s Protective Services). Everybody has to be accountable,” Shilling said Friday.

Summer Stephan, president of the National District Attorneys Association and the district attorney for San Diego County, said prosecutors in murder cases always look at who provided the weapon. But parents or guardians in the household have a unique responsibility because they’re typically in the position to have the most information about the child’s mental state and behavior, she said.

“There’s just an additional responsibility because you have care and custody of the child, and you have more time to have observations of their mental state, of what they said, of any threatening behavior,” Stephan said.