Georgia: A Georgia teenager was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday, 28 July for killing four people and injuring nine others in a 2024 school shooting.
Colt Gray, 16, who on Friday pleaded guilty to 55 counts including murder and assault charges, appeared impassive as a judge in Barrow County Superior Court delivered his sentence.
The judge had two sentencing options: life with or without the possibility of parole.
Gray, a 14-year-old ninth-grader at the time of the 4 September 2024, shooting, brought an assault-style rifle he had received as a Christmas present from his father into Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, hidden inside a roll of poster board.
His father, Colin Gray, was convicted in March on 27 charges, including second-degree murder, for giving his son the rifle despite what prosecutors said were clear red flags, including a shrine to school shooters in the boy's room. It was a rare prosecution of a parent in connection with a child's mass shooting in the United States. Colin Gray is expected to be sentenced on Thursday.
Colt Gray was charged as an adult for the shooting, in which he killed students Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, both 14, and teachers Cristina Irimie, 53, and Richard Aspinwall, 39.
In hearings on Monday and Tuesday, prosecutors argued that Gray was still driven by a desire to achieve the notoriety of other school shooters he admired. They played recordings of jailhouse calls weeks after the shooting in which Gray asked his mother to tell him how the Internet's "true crime community" was reacting to his rampage.