Apalachee High School shooter Colt Gray sentenced to life without parole - NBC News

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WINDER, Ga. — The teenager who idolized mass murderers and used the assault-style rifle he got for Christmas to kill two students and two teachers at his Georgia high school will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Colt Gray, 16, was sentenced Tuesday to life without parole for the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High School that also left another teacher and eight more students wounded, seven of them hit by gunfire.

Barrow County Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm handed down the sentence days after the shooter pleaded guilty to all 55 counts against him, including murder.

“You do not seem to be tormented by what you did, you seem to relish following in the footsteps of the murderers you idolize,” Primm told him. “You aren’t racked with guilt. You’re proud of yourself.”

Primm added, “There’s no joy here.”

“It’s only a measure of closure,” the judge said. “The slain will not return to life. The injured will not forget their wounds, and a 16-year-old, 16-year-old boy, will live and die in prison.”

Gasps could be heard in the courtroom when the judge handed down the sentence. Before he was led out in handcuffs, the shooter glanced quickly up toward the gallery where his grandmother, Debbie Polhamus, had been sitting.

The shooter, who was 14 at the time of the mass attack, was charged as an adult. His trial had been scheduled to start in mid-October.

But he entered the plea without having reached a deal with prosecutors. That left it to the judge to decide whether he should be eligible for parole, after hearing victim statements and each side’s summary of a case that has loomed large over the Atlanta suburb of Winder.

The shooter declined to address the court at his sentencing hearing Tuesday.

Prosecutors said he was obsessed with mass killers and played jailhouse phone conversations with his mother in which he appeared to revel in the attention he received for staging a massacre at the school.

“Four lives were stolen, two of whom were only just beginning,” Primm said. “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 anybody at that school. It was done for the infamy of it.”

Teachers Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, were killed in the shooting.

Their loved ones urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence in victim impact statements delivered in court Friday.

“It is a life sentence of grief and trauma for those left behind,” Aspinwall’s wife, Shayna Aspinwall, told the court. She said their daughters were 2 and 5 when their father was killed and their lives will be “forever marked by his absence.”

Breanna Schermerhorn, whose son Mason was killed, said that while the shooter may have been failed by the adults in his life, it was his decision to commit mass murder.

“Those decisions were his and his alone,” she said.

The judge agreed. And he imposed on the shooter the same sentence that another judge imposed on another mass murderer whom the 16-year-old revered — the gunman who was sentenced to life without parole four years ago for the 2018 shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 14 students and three staff members dead.

“Your plan was not hastily hatched,” Primm said. “It was a slow boil, simmering one in a year’s time. You savored the thought of it. You visualized it, and you fantasized about it.”

“The thought of mimicking these other mass murderers is what brought you joy,” the judge said.

Earlier in the sentencing hearing, a psychologist hired by the defense described the teenager as a “lonely, dysfunctional kid” who had a “chaotic” childhood.

“I thought he was kind of an odd kid,” Kevin Richards said at the sentencing hearing Monday.

His parents abused drugs, had financial problems and fought a lot, Richards said. The family moved frequently and there were long stretches when the boy wasn’t enrolled in school, he said.

So he immersed himself online with the “true crime” community and became obsessed with school shootings, Richards said.

Previously, investigators said they found in his bedroom what they described as a shrine to the Parkland shooter.