Father sentenced to 15 years in landmark school shooting case
A Barrow County judge gave Colin Gray 15 years after he admitted providing the rifle his 14-year-old son used at Apalachee High School, a landmark step in parental liability.
A Barrow County judge sentenced Colin Gray to 15 years in prison after a jury convicted him in March 2026 of second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, reckless conduct and second-degree cruelty to children in the Apalachee High School shooting. Judge Nicholas Primm imposed the sentence in July 2026, days after Gray’s son, Colt Gray, then 16, pleaded guilty to 55 charges and received life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Gray admitted he provided the assault rifle used by his then-14-year-old son in the Sept. 4, 2024 attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, about 45 miles northeast of Atlanta. The shooting killed teachers Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, along with students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14. Several others were wounded, and some accounts said nine people were injured.
The sentencing hearing included victim impact statements, underscoring how the case has moved beyond the teenage gunman to the adult who supplied the weapon. Prosecutors argued Colin Gray bore responsibility because he gave his son access to the rifle and failed to act on warning signs, a theory that persuaded the jury to convict him on charges that went well beyond ordinary negligence.
That is what makes the Georgia case a national test for parental criminal liability. The legal threshold did not turn on the mere presence of a firearm in the home. It turned on whether Gray’s conduct, giving a teenager an assault rifle and ignoring warning signs, was reckless enough to support murder and child cruelty convictions. The 15-year sentence signals that, in at least one courtroom, access plus warning signs can become prison time when a child uses the weapon in a mass shooting.
The sentence also places Georgia alongside the Michigan prosecutions of Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of the Oxford High School shooter. Each Crumbley parent was convicted in separate trials of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to prison terms of 10 to 15 years after the 2021 Oxford attack, which killed four students and injured others. Together, the cases give prosecutors a sharper precedent for charging adults whose decisions about guns and supervision become part of the violence itself.
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