@meghannmcuniff: A Georgia judge on Tuesday (July 28) sentenced a 16-year-old boy to life in prison without parole for murdering four people at his high school in 2024. Colt Gray was 14 when he took an AR-15 to Apalachee High School in Winder on Sept. 4, 2024, and fatally shot students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, as well as Richard Aspinwall, 39 and a math teacher and defensive coordinator for the football team; and Cristina Irimie, 53 and a math teacher. A jury in March convicted the boy's father, Colin Gray, of murder charges for his actions and inactions regarding his son before the shooting, including gifting him the gun despite police telling him to keep him away from weapons after he threatened a school shooting on Discord. Colt this week pleaded guilty to all 55 charges against him, without an agreement with prosecutors regarding sentencing recommendation. Judge Nicholas Primm heard three days of testimony before ruling Colt should not be allowed a chance at parole. "Never before have I had to sentence a 16 year old, certainly for something someone did when they were 14 years of age. Those who appear regularly in front of me have often heard me lament about the difficulty in sending a young person to prison," said Primm, who is the chief judge of Georgia's Piedmont Judicial Circuit. Primm said Colt "assumed responsibility for your crimes" and "made a lengthy and public trial unnecessary." "I also recognize that you were failed by each of your parents. You were failed by your extended family. To a certain extent, you've been failed by a society that can't stop propagating this misguided value in online cultures and social social media, rather than making genuine interpersonal connections and relationships. But that failure does not absolve you from who you chose to idolize, worship and become," Primm said. "Four lives were stolen, two of them really just beginning, 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 anyone at that school. It was done for the infamy of it. Now, your childhood instability and neglect would explain or mitigate finding yourself in one of those problematic places that Dr. Richards testified about. But planning, fantasizing about, visualizing, and executing a school shooting don't put you in a problematic place. It puts you in an unredeemable moral wasteland," the judge said. "Your crimes do reflect permanent incorrigibility, and I will sentence you to life without parole for each of the malice murders that you committed. You understood the horror of what you were going to do. You studied the trials of those other shooters. You even critiqued the victim statements given in those cases, and yet you did this anyway," the judge continued. #law #court #crime

Meghann Cuniff

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Wednesday 29 July 2026 14:06:46 GMT