WINDER, Ga.— A man who gifted his 14-year-old son an assault rifle that he then used to unleash a mass shooting at a Georgia high school was sentenced Thursday to 15 years in prison.A jury in March convicted the man, Colin Gray, on multiple charges, including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, over the Christmas gift his son used in the Sept.
4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High School.In rendering his sentence, Judge Nicholas Primm said he had to measure Gray’s failure to act against the crimes committed by his son.
“I don’t get to sentence with passion.I have the nearly impossible task of sentencing you without passion, despite the immeasurable heartache that you’ve caused,” Primm said.
“On September 4, 2024, lives and families were forever altered.”Gray gave the weapon to his son, Colt Gray, even when a few months earlier law enforcement had come to the Gray home because the teenager had threatened to shoot up an elementary school, according to prosecutors.“The weight of your crimes is tethered and tied to the acts of someone else, your son,” Primm said.“Two scenarios: you fail the same way in both.
You fail to get Colt counseling.You fail to remove the guns from the house.”The younger Gray, now 16, was sentenced to life without parole for the shooting, which left two students and two teachers dead.
Another teacher and eight more students were wounded, seven of them by gunfire.The 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.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.Investigators said he had become particularly fixated on the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine High School in Littleton, C...