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The father of a teenage student who killed two teachers and two classmates in a Georgia high school shooting two years ago was sentenced on Thursday to 15 years in prison for providing his son with the weapon used in the attack.
Colin Gray’s offenses, the judge Nicholas Primm said during the sentencing hearing in Winder, were crimes of negligence “tethered to the tragedy committed by his son” Colton, who was 14 when he entered Apalachee high school on 4 September 2024 and opened fire.
Primm said Gray, who was convicted in March on charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, shared responsibility for the attack, having gifted his son the assault-style rifle as a Christmas present.
“My heart aches for everyone that was there that day, for all of you that have been impacted by it,” said Primm, a Barrow county superior court judge.
“But the law requires that I set aside emotion. 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 caused.”
On Tuesday, Primm sentenced Colton, now 16, to life in prison without parole for the murders of teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39; Cristina Irimie, 53; and 14-year-old students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo. Another teacher and eight students were hurt, seven of them wounded by gunfire.
Colton had entered into a plea deal with prosecutors admitting guilt on 55 counts and avoiding a scheduled October hearing while leaving sentencing up to the judge.
Brian Hobbs, Gray’s defense attorney, asked Primm for a sentence of 10 years for his client followed by 10 more of probation; prosecutors said he deserved 80 years in prison.
He is one of a handful of American parents who have been criminally charged after their children were accused in shootings. A jury in March found Gray guilty of second-degree murder in the deaths of the two students. Georgia law defines second-degree murder as causing the death of a child by committing the crime of cruelty to children.
Gray, 55, was also found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the killings of Aspinwall and Irimie.
In impact statements, family members of the people who died, and other victims of the shooting, condemned what they said were Gray’s failures as a parent.
“This wasn’t unavoidable. This was preventable. Because of the choices made inside the Gray household, four families were handed life sentences of grief,” Breanna Schermerhorn, the mother of Mason, told the court.
Shayna Aspinwall, whose husband was killed, said the sentence must take into account “the families left behind who must carry the grief and trauma for the rest of our lives”.
“He did not pull the trigger but purchased and left a firearm accessible to a minor,” she said.
Prosecutors said Gray gave his son the rifle as a Christmas gift along with ammunition, a gun sight and other shooting accessories.
Jason Smith, an investigator with the Barrow county sheriff’s office, testified that Colton carried the semiautomatic rifle on to the school bus with the barrel sticking out and wrapped in poster board. The teenager left his second-period class and went to a bathroom, emerged with the rifle and shot people in the hallway and a classroom, he said.
The teenager, prosecutors said, was immersed in an online “true crime community” in which he and other young people discussed their obsession with mass shooters – in Gray’s case, Nikolas Cruz, who murdered 14 students and three adults at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in 2018.
Gray, they said, had showed signs of deteriorating mental health in the weeks leading up to the shooting at the school about 45 miles east of Atlanta.
Gray’s attorney said his son “actively hid the depth of his involvement” in the online community, and that a sentence for the father equal to the son’s would erase the line in Georgia law “between the harm a person intends to do and the harm a person fails to prevent”, Hobbs argued.
But Brad Smith, the Barrow county district attorney, said Gray “was convicted for what he did know”. The father, Smith said, ignored “a substantial and unjustifiable risk” in giving his son the weapon despite being aware that Colton had adorned his bedroom walls with photographs and news articles about the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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