BARROW COUNTY, Ga. — The Apalachee High School shooter will spend life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Barrow County Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm handed down the sentence for Colt Gray on Tuesday following three days of testimony and arguments during his sentencing hearing.
On Sept. 4, 2024, Gray shot and killed four people at Apalachee High School: teachers Ricky Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo. Three other students and a teacher who were shot survived.
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During the sentencing, Judge Nicholas Primm said “four lives were stolen” that day and that Gray committed the shooting, not out of hatred or because he was bullied, but “for the infamy of it.”
Here is the transcript of Judge Nicholas Primm handing down Gray’s sentence.
“You know, never before have I had to sentence a 16-year-old. Certainly, for something someone did when they were 14 years of age.
Those who appear regularly in front of me have often heard me lament about the difficulty in sending a young person to prison. And here, as everyone understands, the minimum sentence is life with parole. Now, the appellate courts have said that children are constitutionally different from adults for purposes of sentencing. That stems from an understanding that juveniles aren’t fully formed cognitively.
Hallmark features of a juvenile include immaturity, impulsivity, recklessness, the failure to appreciate risk and consequences. Because of these factors, the Supreme Court says that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the death penalty for juveniles. The Supreme Court also disfavors life without parole for juveniles, declaring it to be a constitutionally forbidden disproportionate sentence in all but the rarest of cases. Life without parole is thus authorized only for youthful crimes reflecting permanent incorrigibility. Life without parole is barred for crimes that are born out of a transient immaturity of you.
Now I recognize that with your guilty plea, you’ve assumed responsibility for your crimes. You have made a lengthy and public trial unnecessary. I also recognize that you were failed by each of your parents. You were failed by your extended family, to a certain extent, you’ve been failed by a society that can’t stop propagating this misguided value in online cultures and social social media, rather than making genuine interpersonal connections and relationships. But that failure does not absolve you from who you chose to idolize, worship, and become.
Four lives were stolen, two of them really just beginning, and it wasn’t done out of fear or anger. You weren’t being bullied at Apalachee. It wasn’t done out of hatred. You didn’t even know anyone at that school. It was done for the infamy of it.
Now, your childhood instability and neglect would explain or mitigate finding yourself in one of those problematic places that Dr. Richards testified about. But planning, fantasizing about, visualizing, and executing school shooting don’t put you in a problematic place. Put you in an unredeemable moral wasteland. Your crimes do reflect permanent incorrigibility, and I will send you to life without parole for each of the malice murders that you committed.
You understood the horror of what you were going to do. You studied the trials of those other shooters. You even critiqued the victim statements given in those cases, and yet you did this anyway. You wrote, ‘I want to make history. I want people to remember the pain I caused.’ And there you succeeded. The pain that you visited upon this community is unlikely to disappear in my lifetime. You do not seem to be tormented by what you did. You seem to relish following in the footsteps of the murderers you idolize. You aren’t racked with guilt. You’re proud of yourself.
Less than a month after the tragedy, you weren’t concerned with the horror you wrought, but rather with but rather with finding out which mass murderers they were comparing you to. A youth may fail to consider the harm his rash action actions inflict before acting, but you did consider it. You studied that pain when you researched the trials of your profane idols. You contemplated that pain over and over. This wasn’t transient immaturity; it was deliberate, contemplated evil.
You were all too aware of the court outcome of those mass shootings, because you studied and obsessed over them, you know that the Aurora theater shooter received life without parole, Nikolas Cruz received life without parole, Ethan Crumley, a juvenile, received life without parole. Yet you were not dissuaded. Your plan was not hastily hacked. It was a slow boil simmering more than a year’s time. You savored the thought of it. You visualized it, and you fantasized about it. You broke it down step by step in visualizing what you were going to do. The thought of mimicking these other mass murderers is what brought you joy.
Now, for the rest of us, there is no joy here today. It’s only a measure of closure. The slain will not return to life. The injured will not forget their wounds, and a 16-year-old, 16-year-old boy, will live and die in prison."
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