WINDER, Ga. (Atlanta News First) — Colin Gray, the father of convicted Apalachee High School mass shooter Colt Gray, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in connection with the shooting on Thursday.

Prosecutors wanted Colin Gray to spend the next 80 years in prison, while defense attorneys asked for 20 years with 10 behind bars. Colin Gray was facing up to 180 years in prison if the maximum sentence for all of the charges was imposed.

Before handing down the sentence, Piedmont Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm heard from the families of victims from the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting.

Primm said his sentencing decision was difficult because all of the charges were for criminal negligence; Colin Gray had no intention to commit a crime; and he didn’t have foreknowledge of his son’s attack.

“You failed as a parent,” Primm told Colin Gray, stressing he could have secured the firearms in his family’s residence, which would have prevented the mass shooting. Primm repeatedly mentioned the names of those killed and injured in the shooting.

Earlier this week, Colt Gray was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing four people and injuring nine others in the mass shooting. Teachers Cristina Irimie and Ricky Aspinwall and 14-year-old students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo were killed.

Colin Gray was convicted earlier this year on all charges in connection with the shooting: two counts of murder in the second degree, two counts of involuntary manslaughter, five counts of reckless conduct and 18 counts of cruelty to children in the second degree.

Schermerhorn’s and Angulo’s families were seen weeping inside the courtroom as Primm announced the sentencing.

Before the sentencing, family members of those who died and victims of the shooting condemned what they said were Colin Gray’s failures as a parent and urged Primm to impose the maximum sentence possible.

“This wasn’t unavoidable,” said Breanna Schermerhorn, whose son was killed. “This was preventable. Because of the choices made inside the Gray household, four families were handed life sentences of grief.”

“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 take into account ”the families left behind who must carry the grief and trauma for the rest of our lives.”

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

Barrow County Sheriff’s Office Investigator Jason Smith testified Colt Gray carried the semiautomatic rifle onto the school bus with the barrel sticking out and wrapped in poster board. The teenager left his second-period class and went to a bathroom, 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 killings, according to testimony during his sentencing hearing. He belonged to a “true crime community” online, where he and other young people discussed their obsession with mass shooters, an investigator testified.

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

Colin Gray’s attorney argued that Colt Gray “actively hid the depth of his involvement” in the “true crime” online community obsessed with mass shooters. The red flags enumerated by prosecutors were spaced out and “surrounded by stretches of a child who laughed, who was bright, who loved his computer, video games, who played guitar, who went into the woods with his father,” attorney Brian Hobbs said.

A decades-long sentence would effectively be “death in prison” for his 55-year-old client, he said. By giving Gray essentially the same sentence as his son, the actual killer, the judge would be erasing the line in Georgia law “between the harm a person intends to do and the harm a person fails to prevent,” Hobbs argued.

Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith countered Colin Gray “was convicted for what he did know.” Gray ignored “a substantial and unjustifiable risk,” Smith said, displaying photos and news articles about the 2018 massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that hung on Colt Gray’s bedroom wall.

“This was the risk that he was ignoring, that there would be a mass shooting of children at a school, and he gave his son the exact tool he would need to accomplish this,” Smith said. ”He is the reason four people are dead, seven were injured and countless others were traumatized, and he is the reason a 16-year-old boy was sentenced two days ago to the rest of his life in prison.”

Along with the two teachers and two students killed, another teacher and eight other students were wounded in the shooting, seven of them hit by gunfire.

Colt Gray’s sentencing came after he pleaded guilty on Friday to four counts of felony murder, four counts of malice murder, four counts of aggravated battery, 25 counts of aggravated assault and 18 counts of cruelty to children in the first degree.

Colin Gray’s trial was the nation’s second judicial case against the parents of an alleged school shooter.

Jennifer and James Crumbley were the first parents ever convicted in a U.S. school mass shooting case. Their son, Ethan Crumbley, 15, killed four students and wounded seven others at Michigan’s Oxford High School in November 2021.

Both were convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each victim killed, and each was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison in April 2024.

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