A Georgia father who bought the rifle his troubled teenage son later used to gun down four people at a secondary school will spend the next 15 years behind bars.
The sentencing marks the end of Georgia’s first prosecution in which a parent was convicted of second-degree murder over a mass shooting carried out by his child.
Colt Gray, 16, received a sentence of life in prison without parole on Tuesday, imposed by a Barrow County Superior Court judge for the 2024 school attack.
That same judge ordered Colt’s father, 55-year-old Colin Gray, to serve a far shorter term than prosecutors sought, declining to impose the 80 years they had requested.
Judge Nicholas Primm pointed out that none of the underlying charges in Colin Gray’s conviction carried mandatory prison time, even as he acknowledged the “immeasurable heartache” the father’s negligence had inflicted.
“The loss here is profound,” Judge Primm said after hearing tearful testimony from relatives of several victims.
“But I still have to distinguish your acts from the malignant heart and the acts that Colt Gray committed.”
Colt Gray, 16, was sentenced to life in prison
Colin Gray’s case is the latest example of US prosecutors pursuing parents after mass shootings committed by their children—an emerging legal approach as authorities search for new tools to confront persistent gun violence in American schools.
Just months before Colt Gray opened fire, the parents of a Michigan teenager who killed four classmates were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison after being found guilty of manslaughter.
In that Michigan case, a jury convicted Jennifer and James Crumbley after concluding they failed to secure firearms at home and overlooked warning signs that their son was mentally disturbed.
In Georgia, Colin Gray’s defence attorney pressed for a sentence of 10 years in prison followed by 10 years of probation, arguing the Crumbleys had clearer advance warning and stressing that Gray was the first parent in the state to face charges stemming from a child’s mass shooting.
“We would ask the court not to make Georgia the national outlier in this first case of its kind, against a defendant whose warnings came with less and whose efforts were more,” the lawyer said.
Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith dismissed the suggestion that Colin Gray lacked notice of the danger, presenting the judge with a replica of a bedroom wall that prosecutors said showed Colt had built a shrine to the gunman responsible for the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
The risk was “staring him in the face every day,” Mr Smith told the judge.
