A Georgia jury has found Colin Gray guilty on all charges related to his actions of failing to stop his teenage son from carrying out a mass shooting at Apalachee High School that killed two students and two teachers in 2024.
The verdict was reached on Tuesday, after just a few hours of deliberations by the jury and two weeks of witness testimony.
Colin Gray faced 27 counts, including two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of involuntary manslaughter, tied to prosecutors’ claim that he knowingly allowed his troubled son access to firearms and ammunition prior to the mass shooting. He had pleaded not guilty to all charges.
His son Colt Gray, who was 14 at the time of the September 4, 2024, shooting, is accused of bringing a AR-15-style rifle his father had given him for Christmas to school and killing two students – Mason Schermerhorn, 14, and Christian Angulo, 14, and two teachers, Richard Aspinwall, 39; and Cristina Irimie, 53. Another teacher and eight other students were wounded.
Colt, now 16, faces 55 felony counts, including murder and aggravated assault. He has pleaded not guilty. A date for his trial has not yet been set.
Colin Gray could have prevented an attack, Barrow County Assistant District Attorney Patricia Brooks said in her closing argument.
“After seeing sign after sign of his son’s deteriorating mental state, his violence, his school shooter obsession, the defendant had sufficient warning that his son was a bomb just waiting to go off,” Brooks told jurors on Monday. “And instead of disarming him, he gave him the detonator.”
In the defense closing argument, Jimmy Berry, agreed that what the dad knew ahead of time was of paramount importance in the case.
“That’s real important because that really is the key to this case, is what did he know?,” he said. “Did he know that Colt would do this?”
The trial
On the stand, Colin Gray broke down when asked if he ever saw red flags.
“No, I struggle with it every day,” he said. “He’s a good kid… to do something that heinous – I don’t know if anybody could ever see that kind of evil. The Colt I knew… there was this whole other side of Colt I didn’t know existed.”
Asked if he tried to help his son, Gray said: “I did, I just wanted him okay.”
Under cross-examination, he acknowledged that multiple firearms were stored unsecured in a closet and that Colt sometimes kept the rifle in his bedroom. Prosecutors highlighted a text message from Colt weeks before the shooting: “Whenever something happens just know the blood is on your hands.”
Jurors also saw body-camera footage from May 2023, when deputies visited the home after an FBI tip about an online threat to shoot up a school. The threat could not be substantiated, and Gray bought the rifle later that year.
During closing arguments, prosecutors showed jurors images of students barricading classroom doors and wounded teenagers being helped after 41 seconds of gunfire.
“Those 41 seconds forever altered the lives of the students of Apalachee High School, their parents and everyone in this community,” Brooks said.
Berry urged jurors not to decide the case on emotion and argued the shooting was impossible to foresee.
“Who would be able to foresee that a 14-year-old is going to take a rifle, as big as it is, as heavy as it is, and stick it in a book bag, get on a bus, come to school, walk down the hall, go to class, put it down on the floor and not one single person sees it?” he said. “How foreseeable is that?”
Prosecutors countered with surveillance video showing Colt boarding a school bus with a backpack concealing the rifle, walking through hallways unnoticed, and spending time in a bathroom shortly before opening fire.
Students testified through tears about being shot in algebra class, seeing classmates bleeding, and believing they might die. In rebuttal, prosecutors said only one person had the full picture.
“The only person who knew every single dot, the only person who knew how much access Colt had to firearms and ammunition, is that man,” Brooks said. “The individuals at the school only had minutes to connect the dots. The defendant had years and he did nothing.”
Brooks told jurors that Colin Gray “shares the blame” and called his actions “criminally negligent,” urging convictions for murder and manslaughter.
“That man was the one person who could have prevented this mass shooting,” she said. “The blood is on their hands.”
Berry argued Colt was “smart” and “manipulative,” hiding his intentions from his father and others. “He never in a million years thought that this son that he loved was going to turn out to be a monster that killed these people,” Berry added.
The case is part of a growing national effort to hold parents criminally responsible when warning signs precede school shootings, following the convictions of James and Jennifer Crumbley in Michigan.
Gray testified that he gave his son a rifle to bond over hunting and trips to the gun range. Prosecutors argued that decision was reckless given what they described as Colt’s spiraling mental health and violent fixation.
The jurors also heard how Colt Gray had an interest in Nikolas Cruz, convicted in the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, his mother Marcee Gray testified.
Colt kept what prosecutors called a “shrine” of Cruz that included photos and news articles on his bedroom wall., according to evidence presented in court.
Marcee Gray said she urged her husband to lock up the guns, but witnesses testified that in the days before the shooting, Colt kept the rifle in his bedroom.
“I never thought that he would even have a thought process of bringing a gun to school or doing any kind of harm to anybody else. Well, on anybody at school,” Colin Gray told jurors during his testimony.
Colt’s parents were separated, and Marcee Gray was not charged.
