WINDER, Ga. — The teenager who idolized mass murderers and used the assault-style rifle he got for Christmas to kill two students and two teachers at his Georgia high school will spend the rest of his life in prison.
Colt Gray, 16, was sentenced Tuesday to life without parole for the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High School that also left another teacher and eight more students wounded, seven of them hit by gunfire.
Barrow County Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm handed down the sentence days after the shooter pleaded guilty to all 55 counts against him, including murder.
“You do not seem to be tormented by what you did, you seem to relish following in the footsteps of the murderers you idolize,” Primm told him. “You aren’t racked with guilt. You’re proud of yourself.”
Primm added, “There’s no joy here.”
“It’s only a measure of closure,” the judge said. “The slain will not return to life. The injured will not forget their wounds, and a 16-year-old, 16-year-old boy, will live and die in prison.”
Gasps could be heard in the courtroom when the judge handed down the sentence. Before he was led out in handcuffs, the shooter glanced quickly up toward the gallery where his grandmother, Debbie Polhamus, had been sitting.
The shooter, who was 14 at the time of the mass attack, was charged as an adult. His trial had been scheduled to start in mid-October.
But he entered the plea without having reached a deal with prosecutors. That left it to the judge to decide whether he should be eligible for parole, after hearing victim statements and each side’s summary of a case that has loomed large over the Atlanta suburb of Winder.
The shooter declined to address the court at his sentencing hearing Tuesday.
Prosecutors said he was obsessed with mass killers and played jailhouse phone conversations with his mother in which he appeared to revel in the attention he received for staging a massacre at the school.
“Four lives were stolen, two of whom were only just beginning,” Primm said. “And it wasn’t done out of fear or anger. You weren’t being bullied at Apalachee. It wasn’t done out of hatred — you didn’t even know anybody at that school. It was done for the infamy of it.”
Teachers Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, were killed in the shooting.
Their loved ones urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence in victim impact statements delivered in court Friday.
“It is a life sentence of grief and trauma for those left behind,” Aspinwall’s wife, Shayna Aspinwall, told the court. She said their daughters were 2 and 5 when their father was killed and their lives will be “forever marked by his absence.”
Breanna Schermerhorn, whose son Mason was killed, said that while the shooter may have been failed by the adults in his life, it was his decision to commit mass murder.
“Those decisions were his and his alone,” she said.
The judge agreed. And he imposed on the shooter the same sentence that another judge imposed on another mass murderer whom the 16-year-old revered — the gunman who was sentenced to life without parole four years ago for the 2018 shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 14 students and three staff members dead.
“Your plan was not hastily hatched,” Primm said. “It was a slow boil, simmering one in a year’s time. You savored the thought of it. You visualized it, and you fantasized about it.”
“The thought of mimicking these other mass murderers is what brought you joy,” the judge said.
Earlier in the sentencing hearing, a psychologist hired by the defense described the teenager as a “lonely, dysfunctional kid” who had a “chaotic” childhood.
“I thought he was kind of an odd kid,” Kevin Richards said at the sentencing hearing Monday.
His parents abused drugs, had financial problems and fought a lot, Richards said. The family moved frequently and there were long stretches when the boy wasn’t enrolled in school, he said.
So he immersed himself online with the “true crime” community and became obsessed with school shootings, Richards said.
Previously, investigators said they found in his bedroom what they described as a shrine to the Parkland shooter.
Gray, investigators said, also became obsessed with the gunmen responsible for the 1999 mass shooting in Colorado at Columbine High School, and the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
The teenager was “kind of obsessed” with them, Richards said.
Ashley Gilleland, an investigator with the Barrow County District Attorney’s Office, testified Tuesday that the shooter had more than 2,000 photos of the Parkland gunman saved on his phone and more photos of that shooter printed and posted on his bedroom wall.
But, Gilleland said, the teenager had hoped “to gain some sort of fame or notoriety from” attacking his classmates at school.
To further buttress that argument, the state played recordings of jail calls between the shooter and his mother, Marcee Gray, from October and November 2024 during which he sounded thrilled to be compared to the Parkland shooter and other mass killers.
“I’m in the big leagues, bro,” he said in one call.
His grandmother testified that her grandson spent long stretches of time with her because his parents were so unstable.
“Well, they always had issues,” Polhamus said. “They were doing a lot of drinking at that time, and then they got way behind on their bills.”
Polhamus said the teenager’s dad, Colin Gray, kept dozens of guns in the house and not all of them were locked up. She said he bought the teenager the gun he used to attack his classmates in order to bond with his son.
“He really wanted to find something that they could do together,” she said.
The elder Gray was convicted by a jury in March on charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for giving his son what turned out to be a multiple murder weapon.
Just before 10 a.m. on the day of the shooting, the shooter told his second-period teacher that he needed to see a crisis counselor but instead went to a bathroom to get ready to attack the school, police said.
When he was unable to re-enter his classroom, he marched down the hall to another classroom and opened fire and also shot at other people in the hallway, police said.
He surrendered to law enforcement officers. In the courtroom, prosecutors played a recording of his interview with investigators during which he sobbed hysterically and repeatedly apologized, calling what he did “horrible” and “the worst nightmare for everyone involved.”
The teenager also described having uncontrollable urges and said he was supposed to see a doctor. “I was so close to getting the help I need and the medication I need,” he told investigators.
But the teenager, prosecutors said, had methodically planned the school shooting, and investigators described finding a notebook in which he detailed a step-by-step plan on how he would get himself ready in the bathroom.
It also came out in the pretrial investigation that sheriff’s deputies had interviewed the father and son in May 2023 about an online threat linked to the younger Gray, who denied making the threat.
During Colin Gray’s trial, an investigator testified that he had sought help for his son from a counseling service weeks before the school shooting but failed to follow through.
Marcee Gray, who was separated from Colin Gray, told investigators she had urged her husband weeks before the shooting to secure his guns and restrict their son’s access to them.
Over time, Colin Gray bought the teenager ammunition, a gunsight and other shooting accessories, court records show.
Dan Gallo reported from Winder, Georgia, and Corky Siemaszko reported from New York.
