Father of Georgia school shooter gets 15 years in prison

A Georgia judge sentenced Colin Gray to 15 years in prison Thursday for giving his 14-year-old son the rifle used in a mass shooting at Apalachee High School, after victims’ families told the court the attack was preventable and prosecutors said warning signs had been ignored.

Gray was convicted by a jury in March on 27 charges, including second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children, in connection with the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting in Winder, Georgia. His son, Colt Gray, now 16, pleaded guilty to 55 charges, including murder, and was sentenced earlier in the week to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The shooting killed two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and two teachers, Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. Another teacher and eight students were wounded, seven of them by gunfire.

Judge Nicholas Primm said he had to weigh the father’s failures against 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 September 4, 2024, lives and families were forever altered.”

Primm also told Gray: “It is clear you failed as a parent. You didn’t get him mental health counseling when it was obvious he needed some. None of those failures helped your case, but those aren’t why you were convicted. You were convicted because the warning lights were flashing brighter and brighter and you didn’t get him help.”

Prosecutors said Colin Gray gave his son an assault rifle as a Christmas gift even though law enforcement had gone to the family home months earlier after the teen threatened to shoot up an elementary school. Prosecutor Brad Smith argued Gray ignored “a substantial and unjustifiable risk.”

“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.”

CBS News reported prosecutors sought an 80-year prison term. Defense attorneys asked for a lesser sentence, arguing Gray had sought mental health treatment for his son. NBC News reported defense attorney Brian Hobbs asked that Gray receive 10 years in prison; CBS News reported the defense sought a 20-year sentence with 10 years to serve, running concurrently.

“That is not lenience,” Hobbs said, according to NBC News. “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 Colt Gray’s mother, Marcee Gray, bore more responsibility for fostering the teen’s obsession with school shooters. She has not been charged in connection with the attack.

Investigators said Colt Gray was obsessed with mass killers, particularly the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut. Prosecutors played jailhouse phone calls with his mother in which he appeared to relish the attention the massacre brought him.

At Thursday’s hearing, victims’ relatives urged the judge to impose the maximum punishment. Shayna Aspinwall, Ricky Aspinwall’s wife and a high school teacher, said she now lives with post-traumatic stress disorder and can no longer teach because she fears another school shooting.

“To the world, Ricky was a math teacher and a football coach. To the players he coached, he was a mentor. To me, he was my best friend, my partner and the person I expected to grow old with,” she said.

Breanna Schermerhorn, Mason’s mother, rejected calling the shooting a tragedy. “People keep calling us a tragedy. But tragedies are unavoidable. This was preventable,” she said.