Could Your Kid’s Crimes Put You in Jail for a Decade?
No one argues that raising a child today is a challenge. The world changed in April 1999 when two high school students entered Columbine High School in Colorado and murdered 13 classmates and a teacher. The parents of the perpetrators ended up paying $1.5 million. They were not charged with any crime.
Yesterday, Colin Gray, father of a 14-year-old who killed four people at his Georgia high school in 2024 was sentenced to 15 years in prison for what was essentially criminally negligent parenting. In issuing the sentence the trial court noted that in the face of the child’s open adoration of other mass shooting incidents, the father gave the child an AK-47 which was kept unlocked in the house and stored with access to ammunition.
Here in Pennsylvania, a grand jury just indicted high school football coaches for their failure to report the sexual assault of a team member by his teammates in August and September 2025. The Cheltenham High School football team canceled both its 2025 and 2026 seasons.
Anyone who has been a teenager or raised a teenager knows these are tough years. You are half-child and half-adult. There are lots of conflicts associated with that status and we know the human brain at that age is not well developed to process them. The result; homicide and suicide combine to account for 37% of teenage deaths in the U.S.
We like to think things like this occur in “other” places, occupied by the poor and undereducated. Cheltenham Township borders Philadelphia. The median household income is just under $110,000 a year. 95% of the adults have a high school diploma and nearly 60% have a bachelor’s degree.
The clear lesson is that if you keep weapons in your house, they need to be under lock and key. But it seems that the internet is a new weapon of choice and its potential for harm is infinitely greater. The Wall Street Journal reports that artificial intelligence is able to provide your kid with the recipe to make a bomb or chemical weapon (“Chatbots Answer Perilous Queries” 7/27/26 p. 1). In Europe there are reports that criminal gangs now enlist teenagers to commit crimes for them by promising to pay money. The kids don’t understand the crimes and are easily duped. It seems the problem is becoming prevalent here and the internet allows criminals to recruit inside some of America’s most affluent and educated households.
No one wants to experience a child captured by criminals or depression. And no one wants to be imprisoned for failing to supervise a child. But the risk is there and it is growing everyday unless parents unite to keep their children out of harm’s way in a world of trouble.