Father who gifted gun to son before he carried out deadly high school shooting jailed for 15 years

A man who gave his son the gun he used in a deadly high school shooting in Georgia has been sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Colin Gray's sentencing comes days after his son, Colt Gray, 16, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the shooting at Apalachee High School, 45 miles northeast of Atlanta.

Two students and two teachers were killed in the incident in September 2024.

A defence attorney for Colin Gray asked the judge for a sentence that would amount to 10 years in prison, followed by 10 years on probation.

But the district attorney said Gray, 55, deserved a sentence of 80 years in prison.

Judge Nicholas Primm noted that all of Gray's crimes were crimes of negligence "tethered to the tragedy committed by his son".

"My heart aches for everyone that was there that day, for all of you that have been impacted by it. But the law requires that I set aside emotion. 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 caused," Judge Primm said.

Colin Gray is one of only a handful of American parents who have been criminally charged after their children were accused in shootings, an emerging legal strategy employed by prosecutors in ​a bid to tackle the epidemic of gun violence in US schools.

A jury in March found Colin Gray 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.

Colin Gray was also 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, seven of them hit by gunfire.

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Family members of those who died and victims of the shooting condemned what they described as Gray's failures as a parent and urged the judge to hand him the maximum sentence possible.

"He did not pull the trigger but purchased and left a firearm accessible to a minor," said Shayna Aspinwall, whose husband was killed.

She said the sentence must factor in "the families left behind who must carry the grief and trauma for the rest of our lives".

Colin Gray gave his son the rifle as a Christmas present, along with ammunition, a gun sight and other shooting accessories, prosecutors said.

Colt Gray carried the semiautomatic rifle on to the school bus with the barrel sticking out and wrapped in poster board, according to testimony from Barrow County Sheriff's Office investigator Jason Smith.

The teenager left class and went to the bathroom. He emerged with the rifle and shot people in the hallway and a classroom, the investigator said.

Colt Gray, who was 14 at the time of the shooting, had shown signs of deteriorating mental health in the weeks leading up to the incident, according to testimony during his sentencing hearing.

He was part of an online "true crime community", where he and other young people discussed their obsession with mass shooters, an investigator testified.

His mother, Marcee Gray, who was separated from Colin Gray, told investigators she had argued with her estranged husband weeks before the shooting, asking him to secure his guns and restrict their son's access.

Barrow County District attorney Brad Smith rejected the claim made by Colin Gray's attorney that he had little warning of ⁠his son's ​violent plans.

He showed the judge a replica of a bedroom ​wall on which the teenager had made a shrine to the gunman behind the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in ​Parkland, Florida.

The risk was "staring him in the face every day," Smith told the judge.

(c) Sky News 2026: Father who gifted gun to son before he carried out deadly high school shooting jailed for 1