Father of Georgia School Shooter Sentenced to 15 Years

The father of the teenager who killed four people at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on July 30 after a jury found him criminally responsible for giving his son the rifle used in the 2024 attack — a first-of-its-kind conviction that has become a landmark test of parental accountability in U.S. school shootings.

Colin Gray, 55, was sentenced by Barrow County Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm, who days earlier sentenced Gray’s son, Colt, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. According to AP News, a jury in March found Gray guilty of second-degree murder in the deaths of 14-year-old students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. Another teacher and eight students were wounded, seven of them by gunfire.

‘It is clear you failed as a parent’

Judge Primm was blunt in addressing the elder Gray before announcing the sentence. “It is clear you failed as a parent,” he said. “You were convicted because the warning lights were flashing brighter and brighter and you didn’t get him help and you didn’t remove his access to the guns.”

Prosecutors had asked for an 80-year term, while the defense requested 10 years in prison followed by 10 years on probation. The judge imposed 15 years for each second-degree murder conviction and 10 years for each involuntary manslaughter conviction, all to run concurrently, as BBC News reported.

Gray gave his son a SIG Sauer M400 semiautomatic rifle as a Christmas gift in 2023, along with ammunition and a gun sight — about seven months after sheriff’s deputies, acting on an FBI tip, visited the family home and asked Gray to restrict his son’s access to guns after the teenager made online threats to commit a school shooting. The teen’s mother, Marcee Gray, who was separated from Colin, told investigators she had argued with him weeks before the shooting, asking him to secure his weapons.

On Sept. 4, 2024, Colt Gray, then 14, carried the rifle onto a school bus wrapped in poster board, left his second-period class, and opened fire in a hallway and classroom, according to testimony cited by AP.

Families speak their pain

Relatives of the victims urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence. “This wasn’t unavoidable. This was preventable. Because of the choices made inside the Gray household, four families were handed life sentences of grief,” said Breanna Schermerhorn, whose son Mason was killed.

Shayna Aspinwall, whose husband Richard was killed, said Gray “did not pull the trigger but purchased and left a firearm accessible to a minor,” adding that the sentence had to account for “the families left behind who must carry the grief and trauma for the rest of our lives.”

A landmark in parental accountability

Gray’s conviction makes him the first parent in the United States to be convicted of second-degree murder for providing a gun to a child who carried out a mass shooting, as The Trace reported. He is also the third U.S. parent held criminally responsible for a child’s mass shooting, following Jennifer and James Crumbley, the Michigan parents convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 Oxford High School shooting. Each was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.

Georgia law makes it a crime to knowingly, intentionally or recklessly provide a handgun to a child, but it does not criminalize the unsafe storage of firearms. At least 26 states and the District of Columbia have child-access prevention laws requiring secure gun storage, The Trace noted, citing research finding that most school shooters obtain their weapons from home.

Experts caution that prosecuting parents alone is unlikely to deter future attacks, but they say limiting young people’s access to firearms reduces the risk of impulsive violence. “The person who’s firing the gun doesn’t even care if they get in trouble, so why would they care if their parents do?” Jaclyn Schildkraut, director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, told The Trace. She added that the most effective prevention remains intervention by people who spot warning signs: “The number one way in which mass shootings don’t happen is that somebody with information comes forward and says something.”

What’s next

Gray’s defense attorney has said the first-of-its-kind conviction will be appealed, according to The Trace. The judge acknowledged the limits of the sentence, telling the courtroom: “This only closes the legal chapter for this horror. The pain, the heartache, they continue.”

With appeals ahead and similar prosecutions pending in other states, the case is likely to shape the legal boundaries of parental responsibility for years to come, sharpening a national debate over guns, school safety, and who bears responsibility when a child turns a weapon on classmates and teachers.