WINDER, Ga. — The father of the teenager accused of opening fire at a Georgia high school, killing four people and wounding nine, was arrested on various charges including second-degree murder, authorities said Thursday.

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, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a social media post.

“These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a weapon,” GBI Director Chris Hosey said at an evening news conference. “His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon.”

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 causes the death of another person.

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

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 neighboring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his 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 a 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 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.