\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Colin Gray\u2019s offenses, the judge Nicholas Primm said during the sentencing hearing in Winder, were crimes of negligence \u201ctethered to the tragedy committed by his son\u201d Colton, who was 14 when he entered Apalachee high school on 4 September 2024 and opened fire.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy heart aches for everyone that was there that day, for all of you that have been impacted by it,\u201d said Primm, a Barrow county superior court judge.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the law requires that I set aside emotion. I don\u2019t get to sentence with passion. I have the nearly impossible task of sentencing you without passion despite the immeasurable heartache that you caused.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Colton had entered into a plea deal with prosecutors admitting guilt on 55 counts and avoiding a scheduled October trial while leaving sentencing up to the judge.<\/p>\n
Brian Hobbs, Gray\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Gray, 55, was also found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the killings of Aspinwall and Irimie.<\/p>\n
In impact statements, family members of the people who died, and other victims of the shooting, condemned what they said were Gray\u2019s failures as a parent.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis wasn\u2019t unavoidable. This was preventable. Because of the choices made inside the Gray household, four families were handed life sentences of grief,\u201d Breanna Schermerhorn, the mother of Mason, told the court.<\/p>\n
Shayna Aspinwall, whose husband was killed, said the sentence must take into account \u201cthe families left behind who must carry the grief and trauma for the rest of our lives\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe did not pull the trigger but purchased and left a firearm accessible to a minor,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said Gray gave his son the rifle as a Christmas gift along with ammunition, a gun sight and other shooting accessories.<\/p>\n
Jason Smith, an investigator with the Barrow county sheriff\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The teenager, prosecutors said, was immersed in an online \u201ctrue crime community\u201d in which he and other young people discussed their obsession with mass shooters \u2013 in Gray\u2019s case, Nikolas Cruz, who murdered 14 students and three adults at Florida\u2019s Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in 2018.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Gray\u2019s attorney said his son \u201cactively hid the depth of his involvement\u201d in the online community, and that a sentence for the father equal to the son\u2019s would erase the line in Georgia law \u201cbetween the harm a person intends to do and the harm a person fails to prevent\u201d, Hobbs argued.<\/p>\n
But Brad Smith, the Barrow county district attorney, said Gray \u201cwas convicted for what he did know\u201d. The father, Smith said, ignored \u201ca substantial and unjustifiable risk\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The Associated Press contributed reporting<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s offenses, the judge Nicholas Primm said during the sentencing hearing in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[2217,8797,997,949,25100,334,2250,8367,4527,7446,637],"class_list":{"0":"post-51543","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-father","9":"tag-georgia","10":"tag-gun","11":"tag-high","12":"tag-providing","13":"tag-school","14":"tag-sentenced","15":"tag-shooter","16":"tag-shooting","17":"tag-teen","18":"tag-years"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}