was sentenced to life without parole <\/a>for the attack, which left two students and two teachers dead. Another teacher and eight more students were wounded, seven of them by gunfire.<\/p>\nThe shooter was 14 at the time of the attack but was charged as an adult. His trial had been scheduled to begin in mid-October until he pleaded guilty without reaching a deal with prosecutors. He declined to address the courtroom at his own sentencing. <\/p>\n
The teenager was obsessed with mass killers, and prosecutors played jailhouse phone calls with his mother in which he appeared to relish the attention the massacre brought him.<\/p>\n
Investigators said he had become particularly fixated on the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.<\/p>\n
Those killed in the Apalachee High School shooting were students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard \u201cRicky\u201d Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53.<\/p>\n
Several victims\u2019 family members testified Thursday, asking that the elder Gray receive the maximum sentence.<\/p>\n
Aspinwall\u2019s wife, who is also a high school teacher, condemned him for failing to be a \u201cresponsible gun owner.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat if another student shot me at school? My kids would have no parents because we were both teachers that aspired to help students learn, not be on the front line,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Maria Schermerhorn, Mason\u2019s mother, rejected the elder Gray\u2019s defense that he was a newly single father, noting that she, too, had once been a single teenage mother.<\/p>\n
\u201cParenting is hard. Parenting alone is even harder. I know that because I lived it … but there is a world of difference between struggling to parent and refusing to parent,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
\u201cEven as a young single mother, I understood something that Mr. Gray apparently did not … I could not control every choice my children would eventually make, but I was responsible for controlling what I put into their hands,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
The shooter\u2019s father showed little emotion as the victims\u2019 families spoke.<\/p>\n
Brian Hobbs, one of his attorneys, argued his client should not be severely sentenced for his son\u2019s crimes, and asked that he receive 10 years in prison.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is not lenience,\u201d Hobbs said. \u201cTen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hobbs also suggested that the teenager\u2019s mother, Marcee Gray, bore more responsibility than his client for fostering his obsession with school shooters. Marcee Gray has not been charged in connection with the shooting.<\/p>\n
Prosecutor Brad Smith said the elder Gray was \u201cconvicted of ignoring a substantial and unjustifiable risk\u201d and that \u201cthe court needs to look at the nature of the risk he ignored\u201d by sentencing him to the maximum.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was the risk he was ignoring \u2014 that there would be a mass shooting of children at a school \u2014 and he gave his son the exact tool he would need to accomplish this,\u201d Smith said. \u201cHe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WINDER, Ga. \u2014 A father who gifted his 14-year-old son an assault rifle that the teenager then used…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-793861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Georgia](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/260303-colin-gray-ew-119p-fb1737.jpg\")
Colin Gray reacts after a jury convicted him of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter at Barrow County Courthouse in Winder, Ga., on March 3. Abbey Cutrer \/ Pool \/ Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP<\/p>\n