WINDER, Ga. >> 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 involuntary manslaughter for letting his son possess a weapon, authorities said.

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

“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Hosey said.

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

Father and son have been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, according to Hosey. Colt Gray has a first court appearance scheduled Friday, but no proceedings were yet scheduled for his father.

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

Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with four counts of murder in the shootings Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta, Hosey said. Arrest warrants obtained by the AP accuse him of using a semiautomatic assault-style rifle in the attack.

Alleged earlier threats, police interview

The teen denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when authorities interviewed him last year about a menacing post on social media, according to a sheriff’s report obtained Thursday.

Conflicting evidence on the post’s origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the report from May 2023 and found nothing that would have justified bringing charges at the time.

“We did not drop the ball at all on this,” Mangum told the Associated Press in an interview. “We did all we could do with what we had at the time.”

When a sheriff’s investigator from Jackson County interviewed Gray and his father last year, the father said the boy had struggled with his parents’ separation and often got picked on at school. The teen frequently fired guns and hunted with his father, who photographed him with deer’s blood on his cheeks.

“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,” Colin Gray said, according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff’s office.

The sheriff’s report says investigator Daniel Miller spoke to the boy and his father on May 21, 2023. The father said his son had access to guns in the house.

“I mean they aren’t loaded, but they are down,” Gray’s father said, according to the interview transcript.

The teen was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Colt Gray, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow.”

The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the sheriff’s office incident report.

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

The FBI said the threat had included photos of guns. Investigators determined that the email address associated with the Discord account belonged to the younger Gray, who was living in Jackson County.

The username on the account was “Lanza,” spelled in Russian, an investigator wrote in a report, noting that it was the surname of the perpetrator who killed 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

During the interview, the two said that they did not speak Russian, and the teenager denied posting the threat on Discord, telling an investigator “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner.”

During a search of the teenager’s room after the shooting Wednesday, police found evidence that he was interested in mass shootings, particularly the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation.

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

The shootings

When the suspect slipped out of math class Wednesday, Lyela Sayarath figured her quiet classmate who recently transferred was skipping school again. But he returned later and wanted back into the room. Some students went to open the locked door but instead backed away.

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

The teen then opened fire in the hallway, authorities said. Sayarath said she heard a barrage of 10 to 15 gunshots. The students fell to the floor and crawled in search of a safe corner to hide.

Isaiah Hooks, an Apalachee High School football player, said he was in a nearby classroom when the shooting started.

“It was rough, just hearing my peers and hearing the sounds, just knowing that people ended up getting hurt,” he said.

He recalled Aspinwall, who was his coach, as a tremendous motivator.

“It was really hard to lose someone that pushed himself to really, like, make us better and make sure that we’re better at what we do,” Hooks said. “He pushed us to be great at what we did.”

This report contains information from the New York Times.