Apalachee High School mass shooter gets life without parole
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Students embrace near a makeshift memorial at Apalachee High School on Sept. 5, 2024 in in Winder, Georgia. Photo: Courtesy of Jessica McGowan/Getty Images
A Georgia judge has sentenced the teenager who pleaded guilty to murder in the 2024 mass shooting at Apalachee High School to life in prison without parole.
The latest: Barrow County Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm handed down the sentence less than a week after 16-year-old Colt Gray entered guilty pleas to all 55 charges against him.
- Gray, who was 14 at the time of the shooting, faced a minimum sentence of life in prison for the murder charge, but the judge had to decide if he would be eligible for parole.
What they're saying: Primm said he understands Gray had a rough childhood and was "failed by each of your parents," but that doesn't absolve him from his choices.
- The judge said Gray not only fantasized about committing a mass shooting but planned it, studied the trials of mass shooters he idolized and said the teen wrote that he wanted to make history.
- "You do not seem to be tormented by what you did," Primm said. "You seem to relish following in the footsteps of the murderers you idolize. You aren't racked with guilt. You're proud of yourself."
Zoom in: Breanna Schermerhorn, the mother of 14-year-old Mason Schermerhorn, one of the four people killed in the shooting, said her son went out of his way to make other students feel safe and became friends with peers who previously bullied him.
- "I had no doubt in my mind if Colt had actually attended school, as he should have, that Mason would have befriended him," she said Friday during the sentencing hearing, according to GPB.
- Shayna Aspinwall, whose husband Richard Aspinwall was also killed, said her daughter's lives will always be "marked by his absence," the AP reported.
- "It is a life sentence of grief and trauma for those left behind," she said.
Catch up quick: The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Colt Gray used an AR-style weapon to kill four people and injure nine others in the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at the school in Winder.
- The victims were identified as two students, Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, 14, and math teachers Christina Irimie, 53, and Aspinwall, 39, who was also an assistant football coach.
- Of the nine people injured, the GBI said eight were students and one was a teacher.
Flashback: Gray's father, Colin Gray, was also charged in connection with the shooting.
- Prosecutors said the elder Gray allowed his son to keep an AR-style rifle in his bedroom and that he knew his son had a shrine to Nikolas Cruz, the mass shooter who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, according to the AJC.
- Colin Gray was convicted in March by a trial jury of second-degree murder and other charges.
Between the lines: During the sentencing hearing, prosecutors played numerous recordings of jail phone calls between Colt Gray and his mother, Marcee Gray.
- His mother kept him abreast of what social media users were saying in the months following the shooting.
- The pair shared excitement over online chatter about him, according to the recordings, with Colt Gray telling his mother to respond to a request from an international media outlet to participate in a documentary about him and asking his mother if she'd created a shrine of him.
- Candice Broce, the state's Department of Family and Children's Services director, said a court issued a no-contact order between Colt Gray and his mother over concerns about the calls.
- "They believed that his mother was fueling this ongoing obsession with school shooters," she said, referring to medical staff who were overseeing his care while he was incarcerated.
What's next: Colin Gray is set to be sentenced later this week.