Dad of school shooter gets 15 years in prison for giving son guns

The father of school shooter Colt Gray has himself been jailed for 15 years for giving his 14-year-old son the guns he used to murder four people. 

Colin Gray was sentenced at a court in Winder, Georgia, on Thursday, making him one of the few American parents who have also suffered criminal sentences for the actions of their children. 

Colin was found guilty of second-degree murder for the deaths of Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14. He received involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of the two teachers, Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. 

His son, Colt, now 16, was earlier this week sentenced to life in prison for the September 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School, which saw eight students and one teacher also wounded. 

Colt received a semiautomatic rifle and ammunition from his father as a Christmas present. 

The then-14-year-old carried the weapon onto a school bus with the poster board-wrapped barrel sticking out of his bag. 

During a second-period bathroom break, the teenager pulled the gun out of his bag in the bathroom and began shooting students and teachers in the hallway, investigators said. 

Prosecutors said Colin had missed several signs of deteriorating mental health in his son, including that his son was in a true crime community, where they openly discussed their obsessions with mᴀss shooters, WHSV reported. 

Colin Gray has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for his son, Colt, killing four people in a school shooting in September 2024

Colt received a sentence of life in prison without parole for killing four at Apalachee High School in September 2024

Colin’s ex-wife, and Colt’s mother, had asked the father to secure all weapons in the house leading up to the shooting, investigators said. 

However, Colin’s attorneys argued that the teenager ‘actively hid the depth of his involvement’ in online communities, and that Colt seemed happy and like a normal teen who liked his video games and going into the woods with his dad prior to the tragedy. 

His lawyers also argued a 15-year sentence would be a death sentence for the 55-year-old, and would be equivalent to giving him the same sentence as Colt. 

Prosecutors, however, said the father received a just punishment for ignoring a ‘substantial and unjustifiable risk.’ 

‘This was the risk that he was ignoring, that there would be a mᴀss shooting of children at a school, and he gave his son the exact tool he would need to accomplish this,’ Barrow County Sheriff’s Office Investigator Jason Smith said. 

‘He is the reason four people are ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, 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.’ 

Colin joins the ranks of James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of Ethan Crumbley, who killed four students at Oxford High School in Michigan in 2021. 

Both Crumbleys were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison for their son’s monstrosity. Ethan, like Colt, received a life in prison without parole sentence. 

Colin appeared emotional during the court proceedings on Thursday 

Last week, during Colt’s sentencing, prosecutors played eerie phone calls between the teen and his mother, where he asked her if she made a shrine of him yet 

Prosecutors said Colt had an obsession with mᴀss shooters and received an semiautomatic rifle for Christmas 

Mason Schermerhorn (second right) and Christian Angulo (far right), both 14, Richard Aspinwall, 39 (far left), and Cristina Irimie, 53 (second left).

Last week, during Colt’s sentencing, prosecutors played eerie phone calls between the teen and his mother that occurred while he was at a youth detention center in the months after the shooting. 

During one call on October 14, 2024, he directed his mother to search what people were saying about him online, a month after the killings.

‘Heck yes, because then I can show you all the pictures,’ his mother, Marcee Gray, said. ‘Oh my God, I’ve got so many new pictures that I’ve got to show you.’

He was excited when she described ‘fan art’ drawings depicting him or comments people made about him and the attention he was getting online.

Colt then rejected his mother’s offer to bring him some physical copies of the pH๏τos and drawings when she visited him, but Marcee said she was making her own.

‘I’m going to print some out just for myself,’ she said, adding that a pH๏τo of her son altered to look like a fox is now her phone lock screen.

Colt then asked: ‘Have you made a shrine yet of me? Have you made the shrine?’

She laughed again before saying she had not, but had been printing out pH๏τos of him. However, her printer was not working at the time, but she would eventually ‘make my Colty shrine.’ 

Colin being led out of the court room on Thursday

Colin joins the ranks of James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of Ethan Crumbley, who were sentenced for the actions of their children 

After the calls were made, Marcee was barred from speaking with her son by a no-contact order.

In September 2024, she wrote a groveling letter apologizing to the victim’s families, saying her son ‘is not a monster.’

In the letter, Marcee – who said she warned the school of an ‘extreme emergency’ before her son opened fire – told families that ‘love is the only thing that will get us through this tragedy’ and asked them to ‘pray’ for Colt and their family.

‘To the parents and families of those affected by the tragic events at Apalachee High School, I want to say that I am so sorry from the bottom of my heart,’ Marcee wrote.

‘If I could take the place of Mason and Christian, I would without a second thought,’ she said, referring to the students killed in the tragedy.

‘As a parent, I’ve always said that the loss of one of my children would be the only thing that I wouldn’t be able to come back from. I feel all of your pain and devastation.’