A Georgia man who gave his teenage son the gun he’s accused of using to kill two students and two teachers at a high school was convicted Tuesday of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.
Jurors took less than two hours to find Colin Gray guilty of all charges in the September 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, northeast of Atlanta. Gray now joins a growing number of parents being held responsible in court after their children were accused in shootings.
Colin Gray was found guilty of second-degree murder in the deaths of two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo. Georgia law defines second-degree murder as causing the death of a child by committing the crime of cruelty to children. Gray was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the killings of teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53.
Another teacher and eight other students were wounded. Gray was also convicted of multiple counts of reckless conduct and cruelty to children.
Reactions to the verdict
Gray showed little emotion as the verdict was read and each juror was polled by the judge. Deputies then cuffed his hands behind his back as he stood at the defense table, speaking with his lawyer. He will be sentenced at a later date. Second-degree murder is punishable by at least 10 but no more than 30 years in prison, while involuntary manslaughter carries a penalty of one to 10 years in prison.
Some relatives of victims wept as the verdicts were read. They declined to comment after court. Gray’s defense lawyers left without speaking to reporters.
“We talk a lot about rights in our country,” Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith said after the verdict. “But God gave us a duty to protect our children, and I hope that we remember that, as parents, as community members, to protect our children because that is our God-given duty.”
The teen’s mother, Marcee Gray, wasn’t charged. She testified that she had urged her estranged husband to take any guns and lock them inside his truck so they would not be accessible to their son. She and Colin Gray were separated in the months leading up to the shooting, and Colt Gray lived mostly with his father during that time. She declined to comment when reached by phone after the verdict.
The shooting
Prosecutors said Gray gave his son the gun as a Christmas gift and allowed him access to it along with ammunition despite the boy’s deteriorating mental health. They said he had “sufficient warning that Colt Gray would harm and endanger” other people.
Fourteen at the time of the shooting, Colt Gray has pleaded not guilty to a total of 55 counts, including murder. A judge has set a status hearing for mid-March.
Investigators said Colt Gray carefully planned the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at the school attended by 1,900 students.
He boarded the school bus with a semiautomatic, assault-style rifle in his book bag, the barrel sticking out and wrapped in poster board, investigators said. He left his second-period class and emerged from a bathroom with the gun and shot people in a classroom and hallways, investigators said.
Parents’ responsibility
Colin Gray knew his son was obsessed with school shooters, even having a shrine in his bedroom to the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, prosecutors said.
“It wasn’t like one parent missed one warning,” Smith told reporters. “This was multiple warnings over a lengthy period of time and, like we said, you just had to do one thing—take that rifle away and this would have been prevented.”
Jennifer and James Crumbley, the first U.S. parents held criminally responsible for a mass school shooting committed by a child, are serving 10-year prison terms for involuntary manslaughter after their son Ethan killed four students and wounded others in Michigan in 2021.
Colin Gray was the first such parent to be charged in Georgia. Smith said Marcee Gray had seen what happened in Michigan and asked her husband to remove the weapons as a result. “So Michigan was able to move the needle to the point that it almost stopped this tragedy,” he said. “We hope we’ve moved the needle a little further.”
Legislative changes
Georgia lawmakers last year passed a school safety bill in response to the shooting. It directs state officials to create an alert system, including the names of students who an investigation has found threatened violence or committed violence at schools.
It also requires law enforcement to notify schools when officers learn a child has threatened death or injury to someone at a school, the implementation of mobile panic alert buttons at schools, quicker transfers of records when students switch schools, and mental health coordinators in each of the state’s 180 school districts.
Legislators also approved a request by Gov. Brian Kemp to spend an extra $50 million on school safety.
