Father of Apalachee High School Shooter Only Gets 15 Years

In the months prior to his son shooting up Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, law enforcement had already been to Colin Gray’s household. His son Colt had threatened, online, to shoot up an elementary school. That happened, and Colin Gray knew it happened.

His response, a few months later, was to buy his fourteen-year-old an ‘AR-platform-style weapon’ and wrap it up for Christmas. He also threw in ammunition and a gun sight for good measure. Not long after that, his son carried that same rifle onto a school bus with the barrel sticking out of a wad of poster board, walked into a bathroom, and came out to kill two teachers and two classmates.

Colin Gray was told, explicitly, that his son had threatened a mass shooting and decided to arm him anyway.

Georgia law allows for up to 180 years on the second-degree murder charges Colin Gray was convicted of. The district attorney, trying to be reasonable about it, asked for 80. Judge Nicholas Primm gave him only fifteen years for a man whose Christmas gift ended four lives and reshaped a dozen more.

I don’t care how many times a judge says he’s setting emotion aside to do his “nearly impossible task.” Fifteen years is an insult to the families who buried their kids and spouses because Colin Gray wanted his son to be a ‘responsible gun owner’™ just like he is.

In his own roundabout way, Judge Primm told Colin Gray directly that he’d failed as a parent, that the warning lights were flashing brighter and brighter in the months before the shooting, and that Gray had two clear chances to stop this. He could get his son into counseling or get the guns out of the house, and Gray failed at both. That’s not a subtle judicial finding. That’s a judge being fully aware of how much responsibility Colin Gray had in the shooting and then handing down a sentence that doesn’t even remotely match the weight of those actions.

Compare it to the other cases prosecutors like to cite when they’re building this kind of charge. Jennifer and James Crumbley, whose son killed four students in Michigan, got ten to fifteen years apiece for involuntary manslaughter with no gun charges on top of it.

Gray was convicted of more on a broader set of facts and still landed inside that same range. Meanwhile in Wisconsin, Jeffrey Rupnow, whose daughter used his guns to kill a teacher and a student at Abundant Life Christian School, is still waiting for his trial to even start, currently scheduled for March of next year, after burning through a failed motion to dismiss and a rejected appeal.

So the country’s furthest data point on this particular kind of accountability is a man who got fifteen years after arming his son with full knowledge of a prior threat, and that’s apparently supposed to count as a harsh outcome.

I’ve seen the argument going around that convictions like this one will “embolden” other prosecutors to bring similar charges against negligent parents, and it’s framed like that’s a cautionary tale.

I’m sorry, but prosecutors should be emboldened. Parents who hand their kids weapons after law enforcement has already shown up at their door should know there’s a real consequence waiting for them if it goes wrong. If the message this case sends is that neglectful gun ownership carries teeth, I’d call that a feature, not a bug. But then again, this is Georgia we’re talking about, a state that has spent years making it easier to carry a gun into more places while doing essentially nothing to keep kids safer inside a classroom.

Fifteen years tells you plenty about whose interests get protected first in that state, and it isn’t the ones sitting in third period.

There’s also a detail from the DFCS testimony that deserves more attention than it’s gotten. Georgia’s child welfare agency told the court it had recently substantiated findings against Colin Gray that included failure to secure a weapon and poisoning. That’s a state agency putting its name behind allegations that go well beyond “he didn’t see this coming.” It suggests a pattern of neglect that predates the shooting by a wide margin, and it makes the fifteen-year sentence look even weaker.

Which brings me, once again, to Colt Gray’s mother, Marcee Gray. The defense spent a good chunk of the sentencing hearing trying to shift blame onto her, pointing to those jailhouse calls where she indulged Colt’s fascination with his own infamy.

If the state’s response to a father who literally handed over the murder weapon is fifteen years, I have a hard time believing anyone’s coming to look seriously at what Marcee Gray did or didn’t do, especially if her home county runs anything like Barrow County has run this whole process. She wasn’t even charged, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for an investigator to show up at her door.

I want to leave you with something Shayna Aspinwall said in that courtroom. Her husband Richard was one of the two teachers killed. She told the judge that her seven-year-old daughter is in therapy now, working through the loss of her father. And then she said that Colin Gray couldn’t be bothered to get his own son into therapy, so now she’s the one who has to get her daughter into therapy instead.

Fifteen years doesn’t undo that trade. Nothing does. But it should at least have cost him more than this.

(Sources)