Teenager pleads guilty to all 55 counts in 2024 fatal shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia

Because he pleaded guilty to murder, Gray faces a minimum sentence of life in prison. The judge must decide whether he should be eligible for parole after hearing victim statements, evidence and each side’s summary of the case.

Gray, who was 14 at the time of the shooting, was charged as an adult with the 55 total counts, including murder in the four deaths and 25 counts of aggravated assault. His trial had been scheduled to start in mid-October in Columbia County, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from where the shooting happened, after the judge agreed to a defense request for a change of venue.

A jury in March convicted his father, Colin Gray, on charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, and he is scheduled to be sentenced next week. Prosecutors said the elder Gray gave his son the assault-style rifle used to open fire at the school.

Teachers Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, died in the shooting. Another teacher and eight more students were wounded, seven of them hit by gunfire.

Gray sat at a table in the courtroom with his feet chained together next to his attorney. Members of the community, including some relatives of victims, were on hand in the courtroom.

Victim statements

Breanna Schermerhorn, whose son Mason was killed, told the judge she does not forgive Colt Gray. She said that while adults around him missed multiple warning signs, he was the one who decided to bring a gun to school and to pull the trigger, saying, “Those decisions were his and his alone.”

She described her son as someone who “made people that were typically unseen feel seen, accepted and safe” and said she was confident he would have befriended Colt Gray if he’d had the chance.

“Mason deserved a future and we all deserved a future with Mason in it, and Colt took that from Mason and everyone who loved him,” she said. She and two of Mason’s sisters asked the judge for a sentence of life without parole.

Shayna Aspinwall, Richard Aspinwall’s wife, told the judge the “grief of losing him is constant” and lamented that the lives of her daughters, who were 2 and 5 when their father died, will be “forever marked by his absence.”

“It is a life sentence of grief and trauma for those left behind,” she said. She asked the judge to sentence Colt Gray to life in prison without the possibility of parole, saying she didn’t want herself and her daughters to have to endure multiple parole hearings.

Gray’s defense attorney wrote in a court filing that he plans to call a psychologist, a counselor at the juvenile detention center where he has been held and his grandmother to testify.

The shooting

Investigators testified that the teenager carried the rifle onto the school bus with the barrel wrapped in a poster board. They said he left his second-period class and emerged from a bathroom with the rifle, shooting people in a classroom and hallway.

Investigators have said Colt Gray carefully plotted the shooting at the high school of 1,900 students. A Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent testified that the teen left a notebook in his classroom with step-by-step instructions and a diagram to prepare for the assault, including an estimate that he could kill as many as 26 people and wound as many as 13 others.

Sheriff’s deputies interviewed Colt and Colin Gray in May 2023 about an online threat linked to the son. Colt Gray denied making the threat. He skipped eighth grade, enrolled as a freshman at Apalachee after the academic year had begun and then had a spotty attendance record.

Investigators found a shrine in Colt Gray’s bedroom to Nikolas Cruz, the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, prosecutors said.

An investigator testified during Colin Gray’s trial that he had been aware that his son’s mental health had deteriorated and sought help from a counseling service weeks before the shooting, citing anger, anxiety and volatility. But the father never followed through on getting help for his son, the investigator said.

His mother, Marcee Gray, who was separated from Colin Gray, told investigators she had urged him weeks before the shooting to secure his guns and restrict their son’s access to them. Instead, over time, Colin Gray bought the boy ammunition, a gun sight and other shooting accessories, records show.

Kate Brumback, The Associated Press

by The Canadian Press

Teenager pleads guilty to all 55 counts in 2024 fatal shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia

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