Father Sentenced After Son’s School Shooting Leaves Four Dead

(Colin Gray. Photo Credit: Vanguard News)

A man whose teenage son killed four people at a US high school was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Thursday, in a rare case of a parent being convicted for their child's shooting.

Colin Gray, 55, gave his son Colt the AR-15-style rifle used in the shooting as a Christmas gift in 2023, despite concerns that the youngster had threatened to commit a school shooting.

Colt Gray, now 16, has been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty to the September 2024 att@ck at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. He was sentenced on Tuesday.

His father, Colin Gray, was convicted by a jury in March of second-degree murd£r, involuntary manslaughter and other offences in connection with the sh00ting carried out by his son, an att@ck that left two 14-year-old students and two teachers d£ad and nine others injured.

Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm told Gray at his sentencing hearing that it was clear he had failed as a parent, noting that he did not provide a stable household and failed to keep his son in school.

The judge said those failures, though damning, were not the basis of the conviction, stressing that Gray was convicted because the warning signs had grown increasingly evident and he neither sought help for his son nor removed his access to firearms.

Sch00l sh00tings remain a disturbingly frequent occurrence in the United States, a country where firearms outnumber the population and regulations governing the purchase of even powerful military-style rifles remain lax.

Parental responsibility in mass sh00tings has drawn growing scrutiny in recent years.

In a closely watched and unprecedented case, the parents of a teenager who sh0t and k!lled four people at a Michigan high school in 2021 were convicted of manslaughter in 2024 and sentenced to between 10 and 15 years in prison.

Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first parents of a school shooter in the United States to be convicted of involuntary manslaughter over their child's actions.

Colin Gray is believed to be the first parent to be charged and convicted of murd£r in connection with a sh00ting carried out by his child.