WINDER, Ga. — A father who gifted his 14-year-old son an assault rifle that the teenager then used to unleash a mass shooting at a Georgia high school was sentenced Thursday to 15 years in prison.
A jury in March convicted Colin Gray on multiple charges, including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, over the Christmas gift his son used in the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High School.
In rendering his sentence, Judge Nicholas Primm said he had to measure Gray’s failure to act against the crimes committed by his son.
“I don’t get to sentence with passion. I have the nearly impossible task of sentencing you without passion, despite the immeasurable heartache that you’ve caused,” Primm said. “On Sept. 4, 2024, lives and families were forever altered.”
Gray gave the weapon to his son, Colt Gray, even when a few months earlier law enforcement had come to their home because the teenager had threatened to shoot up an elementary school, according to prosecutors.
“The weight of your crimes is tethered and tied to the acts of someone else, your son,” Primm said. “Two scenarios: You fail the same way in both. You fail to get Colt counseling. You fail to remove the guns from the house.”
The shooter, now 16, was sentenced to life without parole for the attack, which left two students and two teachers dead. Another teacher and eight more students were wounded, seven of them by gunfire.
The shooter was 14 at the time of the attack but was charged as an adult. His trial had been scheduled to begin in mid-October until he pleaded guilty without reaching a deal with prosecutors. He declined to address the courtroom at his own sentencing.
The teenager was obsessed with mass killers, and prosecutors played jailhouse phone calls with his mother in which he appeared to relish the attention the massacre brought him.
Investigators said he had become particularly fixated on the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
Those killed in the Apalachee High School shooting were students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53.
Several victims’ family members testified Thursday, asking that the elder Gray receive the maximum sentence.
Aspinwall’s wife, who is also a high school teacher, condemned him for failing to be a “responsible gun owner.”
“What if another student shot me at school? My kids would have no parents because we were both teachers that aspired to help students learn, not be on the front line,” she said.
Maria Schermerhorn, Mason’s mother, rejected the elder Gray’s defense that he was a newly single father, noting that she, too, had once been a single teenage mother.
“Parenting is hard. Parenting alone is even harder. I know that because I lived it … but there is a world of difference between struggling to parent and refusing to parent,” she said.
“Even as a young single mother, I understood something that Mr. Gray apparently did not … I could not control every choice my children would eventually make, but I was responsible for controlling what I put into their hands,” she added.
The shooter’s father showed little emotion as the victims’ families spoke.
Brian Hobbs, one of his attorneys, argued his client should not be severely sentenced for his son’s crimes, and asked that he receive 10 years in prison.
“That is not lenience,” Hobbs said. “Ten years in a Georgia prison for a man who never intended to harm a single human being is among the most severe sentences ever imposed on a parent in American history for the act of the child.”
Hobbs also suggested that the teenager’s mother, Marcee Gray, bore more responsibility than his client for fostering his obsession with school shooters. Marcee Gray has not been charged in connection with the shooting.
Prosecutor Brad Smith said the elder Gray was “convicted of ignoring a substantial and unjustifiable risk” and that “the court needs to look at the nature of the risk he ignored” by sentencing him to the maximum.
“This was the risk he was ignoring — that there would be a mass shooting of children at a school — and he gave his son the exact tool he would need to accomplish this,” Smith said. “He is the reason four people are dead, seven were injured and countless others were traumatized. And he is the reason a 16-year-old boy was sentenced two days ago to the rest of his life in prison.”
