Colt Gray, the young man who at the age of 14 killed four people at his school in the state of Georgia, was sentenced this Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the maximum sentence that the law allowed due to his age at the time of the attack.
Barrow County, Georgia Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm handed down the sentence after three days of hearing with testimony from survivors, victims’ families, investigators and mental health experts.
Gray, now 16, pleaded guilty last Friday to all 55 charges, including four counts of intentional homicide, avoiding a jury trial.
Georgia law prevented the death penalty from being imposed because the defendant was 14 years old when he shot, so the only decision left in the judge’s hands was whether he would ever be eligible for parole.
His lawyer, Charlton Allen, called a life sentence without the possibility of parole for a teenager “extreme.”
The minor’s father, Colin Gray, was also found guilty this year of 27 charges, including second-degree murder and cruelty to minors, for giving him the rifle the young man used, despite warnings about his mental health.
The shooting occurred on September 4, 2024 at Apalachee High School, a secondary school in the city of Winder.
Gray fired the gun his father had given him for Christmas and was charged, as an adult, with 55 felonies, including four counts of intentional homicide.
The young man shot with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle and killed teachers Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie, and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo. Another teacher and eight students were also injured.
The Prosecutor’s Office maintained that the massacre was planned for months and presented notebooks, Discord platform messages and school maps with notes on how many people he hoped to kill or injure, in addition to his fascination with perpetrators of previous massacres, including Nikolas Cruz, responsible for the Parkland, Florida, shooting.
District Attorney Brad Smith argued that Gray sought notoriety and asked that he spend the rest of his life in prison.
The prosecution played calls from the juvenile detention center in which the convicted man boasted to his mother that he had surpassed Thomas Crooks in popularity, the young man who tried to assassinate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump weeks before the shooting.
The defense asked to take into account Colt Gray’s years of neglect and untreated mental health problems, but a forensic psychologist testified that he showed symptoms of anxiety, depression and paranoia, although he ruled out that his condition exempted him from criminal responsibility, according to Georgia law.
The Grays’ case is the third in the United States in which a father is tried for a shooting committed by a minor son.
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